Book: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
Release Date: September 1, 1995
Publisher: Vintage Books
Format: Paperback
Source: Bought
Review originally posted in 2025.

For a quarter century, more than a million readers—scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott’s hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice. Advice that begins with the simple words of wisdom passed down from Anne’s father—also a writer—in the iconic passage that gives the book its title:

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

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Why I Picked It Up

This year, I’ve deeply enjoyed author memoirs because, as any other writer will tell you: the process is different for everyone. This year, I’ve talked a lot about books being two-way, prisms, and ultimately relational, and so the penning of them is no different. You have insights you’ll carry into one from the other but each relationship to a work is as fresh as the first—meaning you never quite know what you’re doing.

The tone of Bird by Bird reminded me a lot of an email I got from a (now)-literary agent friend about thirteen years ago when we first connected as teenagers; I’d written on my blog about the tunnel vision of having a passion as a kid and knowing I’d land in publishing, and the call towards it resonated with him.

“There are a lot of people who say they are going to do things,” he wrote, “and some people look past the cliché and really, really want it. You and I both want it and we’re getting it.”1

And part of the reason Bird by Bird is so effective and inspirational for writers is that it taps into the hunger of the work and the writing itself as separate from the desire for publication. Still, it doesn’t tell you to get over it either.

Often when NYT bestsellers cheekily tell you to do it for the love of it (now that they’re on the other side of the angst, terror, existential confusion), it can ring empty for the exact reasons Anne Lamott describes: most of us would at least like the stability to do more of it.

Anne Lamott knows when to fess up to jealousy, money concerns, ambition, desperation, and so that balances out her practicality and her simple love for sitting down at her desk. Both modes can coexist, but she doesn’t lose sight of the joy (or sometimes frustration) in words to paper. Her wisdom, therefore, reverberates throughout her thoughts on drafting, strategies of getting unstuck, writer lifestyles and philosophies, and more.

I read Bird by Bird a few years ago on one side of [redacted book process.] I reread it again the other afternoon and it felt like an entirely new read in light of my experience. So much of it rang true, and so much of the conflicts and agonies she discussed were ones I’ve just experienced over the last year.

So reading it as an emerging writer versus reading it as an author on the other side of [redacted book process] both give me glimmers of insight to squirrel away for a bad day. I’m sure I’ll read it ten years from now reflecting on what comes next for me over the next two years or so and pull away with a new understanding or patina.

What I Loved

Bird by Bird is just a collection of various tidbits that all feel accurate. The title comes from Anne Lamott’s brother sitting down to write an essay and her dad telling him just to go “bird by bird.”

Since I’m sitting down to write a zero draft for the first time in years,2 it was worth revisiting as I’m nervous about how quickly and efficiently I will get words to paper from scratch—and, knowing myself, knowing it will feel bad because they will not be very quality ones. My books are built in revision, with flashes of genius that only come with lots of simmer time (thus far.)

But that’s perfectionism being my enemy—and Anne Lamott has an entire chapter on that. Lately, especially in regards to basically having to “influencer bootcamp” myself—I’m trying to be better about execution over perfection and trusting that my bare minimum is still operating at a high standard.

I say this frequently, but—although I’m an optimist and romantic in details and aesthetic, people are often surprised by how staunchly practical and straightforward I am in many other domains of life. The work of writing is one of them, which is why I appreciate the style of Bird by Bird. It’s encouraging but not flowery. Like me, it’s romantic but not sentimental. In that way, it feels aligned with the groundedness of writers like Mary Oliver (my homegirl), with a dash of Fran Lebowitz for good measure.

I had the thought while rereading Bird by Bird that I have the most beautiful job of all time because my job is literally to be inspired, and that’s what everyone really wants. Bird bv Bird entirely captures that honor and dignity.

And it has plenty of useful lenses that I think plenty of writers can lose sight of (by no fault of their own.) Like my prime advice for “aspiring” authors: that you have to be a reader. I’m perpetually shocked by how many writers want to write without that key element.

Lamott talks about the illusion that finally getting published holds the key to everything without feeling condescending about the misconception. In other words, she gives helpful wisdom and perspective without her experience and success rendering the lens dismissive of the desperate reality of wanting.

Sometimes I could not tell you exactly why, especially when it feels pointless and pitiful, like Sisyphus with cash-flow problems. Other days, my writing is like a person to me—the person who, after all these years, still makes sense to me.

I loved that a lot of her suggestions mirrored what I love most about improving craft—both tangibly and in philosophy. Like that to get better at dialogue and characterization, you really have to listen to how people talk and what they’re saying and how they might miss the mark or hide away certain things. One of my big goals over the last several years has been wanting to be a good listener, and I’m painfully aware of the situations and relationships in which I feel like I don’t do a good enough job. As she points out, you have to will yourself into being receptive and noticing others before you can translate that openness into a story that doesn’t feel flat. Writing is solitary, but creativity cannot be.

She talks about negative space and what doesn’t make it to the page, which is also a huge element of the curation necessity of putting together a book. She talks about the weird tangents or exercises you can use to trick yourself into finding something useful, and how that is occasionally different from avoiding the work of discovery you have to do but don’t want to. As she writes, your psychic muscles sometimes flinch away from the work that’s actually meaningful because you don’t want to confront the truths in it, but how you can also tell when someone’s avoiding what’s actually real.

You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.

I love the organization of each of her chapters. She also has some truly hilarious anecdotes and lines that definitely capture the agony of the whole experience of drafting a book, like practically drinking herself to death after her editor told her that the draft she’d Frankensteined yet again just frankly didn’t work. The cursing, the humor, the idealism, and the devastation of heading in a new direction, oscillating between necessary detachment and feeling like someone is literally slicing into you and perhaps removing your entire reason for being.

She also talks about the impossibility of feeling done, and how you’re done when you simply run out of steam and it’s the very best that you can do and you will never quite close that gap between the finished product and the genius you expected of yourself.

Similarly, she charts the ups and downs of ego and identity formation around the whole thing, marking the points at which she is more writer or person at specific times. She never loses sight of the beauty in it.

You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason...Now, a person's faults are what make them likable.

The overall sense is deeply honest and descriptive, resonant if you’ve been through it and perhaps illuminating if you haven’t. And there are so many lines that won me over entirely. She also reminds me a lot of a writing professor I used to have whom I absolutely adored.

That’s what plot is: what people up and do in spite of everything that tells them they shouldn’t.

You must learn about people from people, not what you read.

“If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.”

But my editor said ‘I’m sorry.’...Luckily, I was still drinking at the time. I had a few hundred more drinks with them, and the merest bit of cocaine—actually, I began to resemble an anteater at one point.

I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let’s think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment.

Overall Thoughts

Bird by Bird is familiar in an “I feel seen” way for writers at any stage of the process, and also holds plenty of thoughtful grist for those who just want to move through existence with a little more receptivity towards being moved or creative. I’ll reread it. It’s profoundly readable and often funny, and maintains its practicality in a way that keeps the inspiration from veering too corny.

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Book: Buzzed by Cynthia Kuhn, Scott Swartzwelder, Wilkie Wilson
Release Date: 2019 (5th Edition)
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Format: Paperback
Source: Bought
Originally reviewed in 2024.

Fully updated, this matter-of-fact handbook includes the most recent discoveries about drug use, including new information on electronic smoking devices, abuse of prescription stimulants, and the opioid crisis. “Lively, highly informative, unbiased, [and] thorough” (Addiction Research & Theory), Buzzed surveys drugs from caffeine to heroin to reveal how these drugs affect the body, the different “highs” they produce, and the circumstances in which they can be deadly. Neither a “Just Say No” treatise nor a “How to” manual, Buzzed is based on the conviction that people make better decisions with accurate information at hand.

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Why I Picked It Up

I actually read this book in 2020, but it’s been on my mind this year because I’ve been trying to be proactive about addressing my most salient flaws and blindspots. In my attempt to be less of a perfectionist and reduce my need for control (and, you know, boost my emotional intelligence), I’ve gone to therapy before I felt like I “needed” it, read various philosophies, and mulled over the role that unconscious influences and other people have on our moods and behaviors. I’ve considered time of day and proportion of routine vs. novelty that best engages my brain.

When do I feel best? When am I most productive? What do I want from the rest of my twenties? When should I give myself grace to be a little idiotic versus be entirely in line? I was sober my entire senior year of college, not because I had alcohol issues, but because I was (am) a control freak and 2019 was such a horrible year that I didn’t want to accidentally cry on a night out.

Plus—hey, I’m an author. I do need a little life experience to be able to write other people and modes effectively, and that awareness can sometimes make me bolder. I’m constantly trying to figure out what might jolt my brain into other modes or perspectives. In case it were not obvious, I am actually on the skittish side of substance use beyond a glass of wine. I don’t judge what others do, but my worst fear is somehow messing up my brain. Still, my under-an-influence self is just as real as the sober one so it’s nice to know more about how everything might affect me.

Content & Writing

What I genuinely do love about this book is that it’s accurate in that it’s non-judgmental. The book itself covers a variety of substances, with a short chapter on each one that takes you through its origin, historical use, relevant developments, short-term effects, long-term effects, and any other info that you might need. It’s clear, interesting, and relatively engaging. Super effortless to get through, even if you just pick it up and skim or use it for reference. Parents, no fear; it’s not encouraging substance use either. It’s pretty neutral, but just wants to present the facts, which is probably the best way to go about it anyway. It’s a social history!

For that reason, I think it would make an amazing gift to anyone you’re close enough to in high school or college—or whenever the giftee is entering the period in which they’re sort-of figuring out what’s comfortable to them and not. I know plenty of kids who went off the rails partying because they started from a place of complete ignorance, and I myself definitely did not hold my liquor well at the beginning.

(I eventually realized that there are many things we will do to mess up our brains, but I still feel better equipped to pick my poison—literally—because of this book. In the past five years or so since I read Buzzed, I’ve thought about it dozens of times.)

It’s not just about the wild ones either. It does talk about caffeine and alcohol, but it also talks about heroin and ecstasy and shrooms with a fair, balanced discussion of a bunch of thoughtful factors and cultural influences. It’s structured neatly and easy to follow. It’s pretty entertaining too.

It’s good to let each of us figure out what we can balance out chemically versus how much we should just let things run their course under the assumption that we're in "complete control" at all times.

What's from our bodies and what's just us? What should you do when you want a specific mode of self? When do you feel like you most know someone else, or like they're most authentically themselves? Know thyself and all.

Related Books

wine / Wine Folly by Madeline Puckette and Justin Hammack

sobriety / Sober Curious by Ruby Warrington (not my fave but people love it)

drunkenness / Drunk by Edward Slingerland

women & alcohol / Girly Drinks by Mallory O’Meara

dopamine / The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Mike Long

chemistry of connection / The Chemistry Between Us by Brian Alexander and Larry Young

social belonging / Survival of the Friendliest by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods

addiction / The Urge by Carl Erik Fisher

altered states / Altered States of Consciousness by Marc Wittmann and Philippa Hurd

Big Pharma / Dopesick by Beth Macy

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Book: Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Release Date: April 1864
Publisher: Vintage
Format: Paperback
Source: Bought
Translated by Richard Pevear + Larissa Volokhonsky—
Originally reviewed September 2025.

One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.

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Why I Picked It Up

Dostoevsky (Dostoyevsky) is my most “performative” read alongside McCarthy, indicating that there is a stubborn pride within me determined to be seen at my full intellectual capacity. Despite me thinking that derision towards genre is frankly bullshit, I still ended up down the rabbit hole of older literary fiction—partly because during [redacted book process], I knew reading contemporary books would make me overthink how my own manuscript held up to industry patterns. One day, I looked up and I was in the middle of The Idiot, Notes from Underground, and Crime and Punishment?

I have thoughts on each so far, but Notes is the one I finished most recently and can therefore critique. It’s a funky read, both in format and emotion, and I do think people read it with a generosity they wouldn’t necessarily give to the same book if the author name were anonymous. But such is history and the lit scene, my friends. There are plenty of modern books like that too.

About ‘Notes from Underground’

Overall, the main character (antihero) of Notes is meant to be the kind of guy causing his own problems—who tanks his social connections and can’t entirely see it because he’s so angry over his isolation.

The first half of the book is a scattering of various lines and musings (conversational, overwhelming, considered) while the second details the narrator poor, frustrated, and fumbling in his interactions.

Some of his misfortune is bad luck, sure, but some of it’s him deflecting responsibility for his own feelings and reactions. In the first half of the book, I liked him musing about suffering and consciousness, giving someone a way out of their self-pity, and the “beautiful and lofty.”

I think a lot about studies showing that defensiveness and pride are basically the emotional states that completely stop, neurologically, the processes of listening required to feel like you’re connected with others. (See: You’re Not Listening, The Love Prescription, Why We Click, etc.)1

In the second half of the novella, where the plot really begins, the character starts by nursing his hurt and frustration from growing up on the outskirts and essentially insulates himself by becoming as well-read and well-studied as he possibly can. That feeds a sense of superiority over others, so that when they exclude him, he can console himself with thoughts that he is so much better than everyone he was encountering. The pendulum swings from desperation for their approval to resentment and hatred both of them and of himself, believing others have nefarious—or at least, ungenerous—intentions. But because he lives inside his own head so entirely, nobody can touch him or reach him even as he creates his own suffering.

So much have we lost touch with 'real life' that we occasionally feel a kind of disgust for it and so can't bear to be reminded of it. For we have arrived at the point where we look on 'real life' as toil, almost as compulsory service, and all of us privately agree that 'life' as we find it in a book is better.

When he missteps or lashes out in cruelty, he then spirals in shame which then feeds the need to only go between these two extremes: “I need them to notice me and care about me in the way I fantasize about” to “I’m so much better than everyone that I’m going to barricade myself away from all of them or tell them how terrible and shitty they are because they made me feel this way.” The underground man doesn’t take responsibility for himself or his feelings, but instead blames others.

Those he encounters are not angelic either (there was a flash of familiarity many might recognize in the friends-who-aren’t-really-friends anecdotes of when you’re trying to worm your way into a group that really doesn’t care about you), but it’s not their fault that his reactions and behavior to the unevenness of that dynamic exacerbate their desire to avoid him too.

The dynamic of still wanting is baffling in its immaturity but undeniably human; his desperation for approval becomes more about proving he hadn’t fucked up previously than about actual connection, but the underground man doesn’t recognize that he’s acting like an ostracized teenager in that way. Scoffing at socialization entirely (defensively, again) is still structuring your life around others’ approval, just rejecting them before they can reject you.

It can be exhausting to be so fixated on warped dynamics like the dinner party depicted here, and the narrator’s clearly backed himself in a corner. So I have grace, despite flinching. His method is not a very pleasant way of living (although ideally something you grow out of eventually) and the novella emphasizes his loneliness even when he doesn’t admit it to himself. You may, however, find it insufferable.

In every man’s memories there are such things as he will reveal not to everyone, but perhaps only to friends. There are also such as he will reveal not even to friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. Then, finally, there are such as a man is afraid to reveal even to himself, and every decent man will have accumulated quite a few things of this sort.

There’s some odd humor in his need for validation or superiority too (beyond this tendency which I recognize from having been a teenage girl at one point.) For example, one of the anecdotes in the second half of the novella involves Dostoevsky writing pages about playing chicken with a specific guy in the streets. Others always swerved for him, and the narrator psychs himself up for pages and pages to not swerve, because this will prove to him that they are equals. He’s obsessive; the other guy is just walking.

And then when he’s talking with others, he gets so much pleasure from ironing out his ideas in front of them and feeling smart that he really does not give a damn about what the conversation does or whether he feels connected to someone—which is where he goes wrong. He’d rather talk at someone than to them. (Incel book???)

Notes from Underground depicts the locked away, repressed, separate, and there’s a reason we’re largely meant to be social creatures. Despite my own emphasis on independence and self-sufficiency, we do ultimately need to feel like others see us and vice versa, and need the humility to be able to accept that in combination.

Within the voice, there’s a fundamental paranoia and distrust below each line of the work, and the narrator’s fear of judgement is blatantly obvious. He’s pretty damn cruel and self-important, and maybe some of that’s innate beyond what’s caused by his initial social impressions. He feels everything far too deeply, and takes it all as a slight, so then he lashes out in response. Later, he wallows and hates himself for all of it, which is often deeply painful and bitter. (I think a lot about assuming others’ intentions and how we misstep in that regard.)

It is clear to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same feeling to everyone.

At the time I read this book, I was thinking about very locked-up people, so my spiel is a bit of a tangent—

For that reason, the book is a good read because you can analyze the hurt on both sides of the equation. There’s what you feel about another person, and then there’s taking responsibility for your role in that emotion’s construction i.e. what you’re projecting. There are multiple instances of the narrator taking a small instance as a reason to spiral and go dark, versus maintaining the peace by letting it go. Suspicion can be self-fulfilling prophecy. (See: How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett.)

As an optimist, I’d like to think that conflict like this could be smoothed out if someone were tough enough to let the waves and spirals break over them for long enough without offense. It’s a tricky balance in that you shouldn’t take verbal abuse and you should want to spend time with people who make you feel good, but I do think sometimes characters like this prove the necessity of letting someone unravel their own self-sabotage within a negative feedback loop. Basically (as corny as it sounds), it takes a lot of strength to let someone treat you as weak and to know that’s not true, but the patience of letting them run out their defense mechanisms might be all that interrupts the loops. (Of course, there’s a line.)

There’s some learned toxicity built up in sheer isolationism, but it started with feeling cut off from others in the first place and learning to double down on that as a fundamental point of identity. Dostoevsky’s underground man thinks he’s wired the same forever, which is why he perpetuates his situation.

It was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.

A pillar like that’s not just going to disappear overnight, but I don’t think he’s automatically doomed, so this is where I diverge from any fatalism in the novella. He can react differently at any point, and his curse is just that he refuses to admit he has the choice to.

And then again, I’ve always loved Flannery O’Connor‘s definition of a “moment of grace” being something almost violent because it changes your worldview in a way that upsets your natural desire for the status quo. “The devil you know” and all that. I think Dostoevsky would agree with considering his views on masochism and autonomy.

Man only likes counting his grief, he doesn't count his happiness. But if he were to count properly, he'd see that there's enough of both lots for him.

The book has the same bleak loneliness I feel from writers like John Kaag and David Foster Wallace—like they’re just going in circles and circles that trap them in the inevitability of solitude that’s no longer a choice.

Apologies to the men out there if I’m making Dostoevsky sound too “soft” (lol.) I might just always believe in redemption and active choice. Maybe that makes me a pushover, but I’ll probably always be gentle about a book that deals with fundamental loneliness and a belief there’s no way out of that. (I love neuroplasticity.)

Patterns are definitely worth considering, and the discipline of emotional evenness is important to cultivate beyond the easy out of blaming others for your feelings. But Dostoevsky addresses the paradoxical awareness of this misery too—how man, in his view, would rather make a choice that makes him miserable (but fully autonomous) rather than feel that he had in any way compromised with another person for his happiness. The key is the shift in viewing compromise as necessary for love of any kind, which is a lot to ask from someone who’s convinced himself that others must always be the problem and he is forever separate from them.

What made them necessarily imagine that what man needs is necessarily a reasonably profitable wanting? Man needs only independent wanting, whatever this independence may cost and whatever it may lead.

...if it were even proved to him mathematically and by natural science, he would still not come to reason, but would do something contrary on purpose, solely out of ingratitude alone; essentially to have his own way.

Each of the writers I mention go to extremes from the “I can’t see anybody else beyond me” to the “I feel so bad and lonely and trapped I want to die” which invite questions about how to reintroduce interdependence and co-regulation when you’ve walled yourself off for so long from others as a viable source of homeostasis.

Of course defensiveness is going to bubble up first when you try to pierce that, and I feel like the trap of that instinct is what the novella speaks to most.

In that sense, it’s a book about the mechanics of isolation and how it can be self-perpetuating once you get paranoid about the viability of connecting at all. Which is, in itself, a valuable conversation even if you find the story and its emotions to be hard to read. The particular strength of self-sabotage. It’s disjointed, and I can’t quite say it’s too pleasant of a read (I don’t think I love Dostoevsky’s voice) but I was glad to cross it off my list.

The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.

But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.

Achieving he likes, but having achieved he does not quite like, and that, of course, is terribly funny.

Is it possible to be perfectly candid with oneself and not be afraid of the whole truth?

For fans of:

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami; Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace; Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky; American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag; Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes; etc.

If perhaps the thoughts feel familiar, I’d recommend East of Eden for a look at how we carry shame, and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger for catching yourself on your own spirals.

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There is absolutely nothing I would love more than to be able to devote more time and energy to Words Like Silver, which has remained a one-person effort since age 13. If my work makes a difference to you, I’d love if you’d consider becoming a subscriber or upgrading your subscription below. You can also make a one-time donation on my website. Anything makes such a massive difference, and I appreciate the support more than you can imagine.

Book: Each Night Was Illuminated by Jodi Lynn Anderson
Release Date: September 2022
Publisher: HarperTeen
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher

Originally reviewed 2024.

With writing that sparks off the page, New York Times bestselling author Jodi Lynn Anderson tells a story of saints and floods, secrets and truths, rage and love—and the bravery it takes to bet your whole life on a new kind of hope.

The day the train fell in the lake, Cassie stopped believing in much of anything, despite growing up in a devout Catholic family. Then she set her mind to forgetting the strange boy named Elias who was with her when it happened.

When Elias comes back to town after many years away, Cassie finds herself talked into sneaking out at night to follow him ghost-hunting—though she knows better than to believe they will find any spirits.

Still, the more time she spends with Elias—with his questions, his rebelliousness, his imagination that is so much bigger than the box she has made for herself—the more Cassie thinks that even in a world that seems broken beyond repair, there just may be something worth believing in.

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Why I Picked It Up

Jodi Lynn Anderson is one of my favorite writers, and is so significantly underrated. Tiger Lily and Midnight at the Electric hit me differently with each reread, so I’ll devour whatever she writes: the epitome of complex, take-what-you-need, effortless beauty.

Each Night Was Illuminated felt like an even quieter book in the vein of her The Vanishing Season (which is also great) in that it’s more about theme than plot.

It might not immediately make sense to the reader how polarization, environmentalism, and the subtle disintegration of belief — not solely in religion but in absolutely anything — tie together, but Anderson combines and connects them elegantly.1 You can absolutely read into layers and parallels to our current climate, whether through the intensified hurricanes (a personal ouch of mine lately) or the charged political speech.

My Storm Connection

I’m typing up this review much later than I initially wrote it, but in my longhand draft, I noted that I reviewed it directly after waking up from one of the worst nightmares I’d ever had (because “apparently altitude can do that to you” and I was in Park City for work at the time.)

In my nightmare, everything flooded, which sounds pretty standard. But maybe because of the personal effects—or rather, the intensity of my terror—re: the hurricanes of the fall had on me, I woke up viscerally horrified. Probably because the storm braced for Tampa got so close.2

The subtlety of this book makes a lot of sense having witnessed it personally too: the gradual ways in which belief, politics, change vs. sameness, all of it impacted our experience of the hurricanes this time around versus in the hunkering-down of my childhood.

It’s not just the hurricane that affects you; it’s how a storm or significant disaster—as those in L.A. can attest—can so suddenly alter your sense of permanence, safety, or even gratitude. (There’s another great book about this: This Is the Story of You by Beth Kephart. But I want to reread it before reviewing, since it’s been a solid five years.) Hometowns, especially, can be tricky, no matter how detached you might feel.3

What It’s About

Admittedly, I think it’s a little tricky to tell from the jacket copy what exactly this book is about—at least in how it hit for me. I love Jodi Lynn Anderson, but otherwise might have found the plot too abstract in the description. Basically, Cassie witnesses an accident and loses her belief. That impacts her lens in her teen years.

'You'd be good at being angry,' he said. 'You'd get it right.'

When a neighbor friend Elias returns to town, so does a charismatic preacher who starts to lock the town into his warping ideology—and brilliantly turns the town against any dissenters. It’s all very “frog in the boiling pot” as a metaphor and very true to how genuine indoctrination (in anything) happens. This book isn’t in-your-face, but I think many will recognize the sensation: the particular isolation of sudden, fundamental difference, especially as it bleeds into other domains of life. That loneliness and awareness of change is so beautifully articulated.

She can’t sleep. (Or he can’t sleep? I can’t quite remember?) And she ends up seeing Elias leaving his place at night, and eventually joining him. He’s decoding some mystery at the abandoned mansion in town, not so much because she believes in what he’s doing but for the company.

Studying him, I had time to realize I was scared of him. Spending time with him was like opening a window to get air. I didn't know why he chose me to share his blood with when we were kids. And I supposed that's what happens when someone who awes you also chooses to be interested in you. You can't help but fear it, and you don't want to let it disappear, and you want to be enough to deserve it. I guessed that was a story as old as time.

If the jacket copy doesn’t share the rest of the book, I won’t. There’s not a particularly clear way to review it. But overall, Each Night Was Illuminated is classic Jodi Lynn Anderson—a little weird and a lot thoughtful. Not for everyone, but will resonate if you need it. It’s meditative, and short enough that it’s worth the try if you’re unsure.

Overall Thoughts

The book itself is a little dreamy, floating above the rest of us. It’s poignant and a little weird, which is very in line with my taste. Her neighbor friend goes ghost-hunting, insomnia is prevalent, allure escapes reason, etc,.

I think frequently about how people shift so infinitesimally that one day, you look up and everything might be different. Change can happen in such small increments that you either can’t recognize it or you can’t call it out if it’s in a worrying direction. Like I said in my Tiger Lily review: all moments are just moments, at the time; they only become symbols or catalysts in hindsight, when they’re stitching together a pattern based on outcome.

How do minds change?

What about is it about someone—or in this case, a place—remains the same?

Although I keep reaching for descriptors like quiet or subtle, you feel the undercurrent of distress and urgency in this recognition, although the overall mood and atmosphere is poetic and almost tranquil in a way I crave from Jodi Lynn Anderson’s reads. She works gracefully with the unspoken and the unsaid, pushing you right up to the edge so you can see for yourself, and that’s such an impressive skill in storytelling. It’s abstract in some ways, but depicts the realism of how you encounter these kinds of moments, changes, and combinations in life: messily.

Overall, Each Night Was Illuminated is beautiful and gripping. It’s slow, muted, and layered. It may be too subtle for some, but I would love to book club it with someone. Another win from Jodi Lynn Anderson, for sure.

For fans of:

I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson; Places No One Knows by Brenna Yovanoff; This Is the Story of You by Beth Kephart; Bone Gap by Laura Ruby; Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma; When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead; Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta; We Are Okay by Nina LaCour; The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider; A Million Junes by Emily Henry

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Book: American Fantasy by Emma Straub
Release Date: April 2026
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Format: eBook
Source: Library

From New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow, an irresistible story about what happens when your teenage fantasy comes true after you’re already an adult.

When the American Fantasy cruise ship sets sail for a four-day themed voyage, aboard are all five members of a famous, nineties-era boy band and three thousand screaming women who have worshipped them since childhood.

Feeling slightly out of place amid this crowd is Annie, here on a lark to appease her sister. Yet when the lights come up and the idols of her youth begin to sing, something is unlocked. Call it memory. Call it nostalgia. Call it the chemical reaction of hormones, hope, and sexual reawakening. Between the slushy alcoholic drinks, the familiar music, and the throngs of middle-aged women acting like lovesick teenagers, Annie finally reconnects to a long-submerged part of herself. By the time she meets one of the band members—not just a celebrity but someone in need of a friend—she has accessed a new sense of possibility.

In a smart and incisive book packed with laugh-out-loud reflections on fame, aging, and marriage, Emma Straub delivers a richly textured story that shows us real passion is never truly lost, that what we love makes us who we are, and that deep meaning can sometimes be found in a sea of screaming fans.

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Why I Picked It Up

Boy band book on a cruise sounded just about right. I love a good high-low premise, especially one that promises to weave in some more existential themes like what fandom says about aging or the trajectory of our lives. When done well, it really hits. Also, I know plenty of people who love Emma Straub, but I hadn't yet picked up a book of hers.

PS. It even made me go down a “boy band” and “musician” reading kick back in June.

About the Book

The scope of the book is interesting because American Fantasy focuses on three individuals: Keith, a member of the boy band whose brother calls the shots; Sarah, the lesbian cruise director who’s excellent at her job and at wrangling all of them; Annie, the reluctant (but earnest) fifty-something rediscovering herself after divorce. They each have varying relationships with the concept of the Boy Talk cruise and how about it can be dehumanizing and empowering depending on the scenario, etc.

I’d say a lot of the book’s strongest points are when it talks about the group effects of euphoria, and what’s an energy-giver (something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately) in that a lot of the baggage going along with the band can be so terrible, but its popularity is due to the escapism and the art itself becoming a larger entity. (There’s a similar conversation in Daisy Jones & the Six about realizing when your art goes beyond you that it’s a new beast.)

Voice & Tone

The voice of American Fantasy is very specific. It’s tonally a bit ungenerous and by that, I mean it zeroes in on the “uglier” details of a glamorous vacation like this one—the sweat patches, the bodily, the characteristics in someone or something you try not to notice. It can feel almost harsh, which works for the kinds of dissonance-related questions the book is asking about girlhood and entertainment and the artificial, plasticky vacation delivered by slushy cocktails and cruise pamphlets. It’s a book that reminds me of other books, but I can’t pinpoint exactly which ones.

I’m blanking on how exactly to describe the voice. It’s very specific, but also feels somehow distant from the characters. It’s not quite to my preference in regards to prose because it’s colorful but lacks a certain grip or traction; for example, I found it difficult to keep track of names because I didn’t connect with the characters, although I underlined a few moments that felt particularly poignant or well-said.

I feel like Straub overall did a good job, but there were moments I thought she should have leaned into more and moments I thought she lingered on a little too much without resolution.

I would note that I think in a three-POV book, even in third-person, readers expect a little more collision between characters; this, instead, is more so just depicting each person’s view of the fandom, event, their lives up until that point, etc. so may feel less finished than readers expect. I’d say it leans more into commentary than characterization: each figure as a vehicle for something else.

It could be a little absurd at times, which is what I was largely looking for when reading this, and sobering at others, which captures the oscillation many of the women on this cruise would experience.

Overall Thoughts

My library copy returned itself shortly after I finished, or else I would share some quotes here that I liked. Overall, I enjoyed American Fantasy for what it was.

I like a lot of the conversations we have around why we cling to forms of art and entertainment, or how a particular cultural moment—an event, a band, a trend—can become a symbol. I like chatting about art as prism, our attempts to hold onto the intangible, what you do when you’re tallying the effects of your choices. Like a lot of the characters in this book, I’ve been mulling over questions of pivot and identity.

Her writing isn’t particularly to my style, as I find terms of distance tend to be particular to writers as they move onto other books. It was just a little too far away for being a “quiet, intimate” book. As a plot, I probably wanted more, but it was an enjoyable read for the mood I was in.

For fans of:

Birds of California by Katie Cotugno; This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs; One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London; Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage; American Royals by Katharine McGee; Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfield; etc.

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Book: Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley
Release Date: March 16, 2021
Publisher: Henry Holt & Co.
Format: Hardcover
Source: Bought
Review written + posted May 2023.

Eighteen-year-old Daunis’s mixed heritage has always made her feel like an outsider, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. When she witnesses a shocking murder, she reluctantly agrees to be part of a covert FBI operation into a series of drug-related deaths. But the deceptions – and deaths – keep piling up and soon the threat strikes too close to home. Now Daunis must decide what it means to be a strong Anishinaabe kwe (Ojibwe woman) and how far she’ll go to protect her community, even if it tears apart the only world she’s ever known.

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Why I Picked It Up

On a purely surface-level basis, I have a lot of reasons for championing this book.

• Publishing is less than 1% Indigenous, so I’m all for that representation.

• The author, Angeline Boulley, was a full weekend warrior on this read, meaning that she worked in stolen fragments of time for over 10 years to make it happen. Respect to the hustle. I love seeing those slow-burn stories rewarded in publishing.

• The cover is one of my favorites of all time.

For the record, this book has done phenomenally since its publication. It’s a Reese’s Book Club pick, a Barnes & Noble teen book club pick, and is the first YA release in a while to reach the coveted No. 1 New York Times Bestseller spot as a debut. So my interest was piqued. I knew I was going to read it, but as soon as that news came out, I immediately dropped everything and drove to Barnes & Noble so that I could be in on the buzz.

About the Book

Firekeeper’s Daughter was a five-star read for me.It’s now seared into my memory, and is also one that feels different than anything else I’ve read. Those two qualities tend to do it for me.

Across the board, it did a great job. It was slow and steady, but had enough twists and distractions to keep me engaged. The characters were thoughtful and multi-faceted, the plotting was thorough and intense when it needed to be, and the emotional core of it was powerful. Additionally, as mentioned, it’s an Indigenous read that uses Native American Ojibwe language, culture, ritual, and history to complicate and inform each aspect of the story. I obviously can’t speak to the accuracy, but Angeline Boulley has a lovely note about how she never wanted to shy away from having them speak their language or acknowledge their customs, because it’s not catered to white readers. The community was real and visceral in a way that has been underrepresented in YA.

In my Reese’s Book Club review, I called it a tender thriller. Even now, that descriptor feels as distilled and accurate as I can possibly make it. They’re two variant tones, but Boulley infuses the flavor of each into the narrative. It has the twists and danger and grit of a thriller, but it’s also a warm and complicated coming-of-age, both on an individual basis (Daunis) and a collective basis (the community.) It was long, and for good reason. There were a lot of threads to develop, and yet they still all tied together at the end, so that felt masterful.

I don’t normally read crime fiction, so I was shocked by how easily Angeline Boulley was able to create a plot revolving around meth. Most YA books of this nature shy away, but one scene quite literally has Daunis learning how to make it so that she can learn about its composition. That adds to my feeling of “I haven’t read anything else like this” in a way that was refreshing, informative, and endlessly fascinating.

I think where Firekeeper’s Daughter really excels is in the depth of connection to each character. I can normally call out when a book is flat, or appreciate when it’s complex, but I don’t even know how to convey how impressed I am by the realism of the web that Boulley weaves.

Characters

The complexity of the characters wow’d me. They felt distinctive and fleshed out and tough. Supporting characters, like the mom, had real undertones of grief and confusion that underscored (beautifully) the way they went about their lives. Daunis was resilient and lovely. She is memorable. She’s not necessarily one of the characters I would end-all obsess over, but she’s a solid girl with a strong character development arc. I loved how loyal she was to her family and how she navigated her coming-of-age choices.

My favorite aspect of her character was how seamlessly her science interest encapsulated both her Native knowledge of plants, chemistry, and spirituality, and her technical Western know-how. In undergrad, my specialty—the series of classes I most took to, at least, aside from art—was history of science. I spent one entire class researching how Western education failed and misrepresented the validity of Native science. Then I went on to make a print project visualizing it in my studio art minor, copied below. (Isn’t it great when interests overlap?!

The science experiments embedded in the manuscript exemplified how most authors would have shied away from certain subject matter. Three pages on Daunis constructing an experiment over various species of mushrooms probably would have been edited out in most manuscripts — surely modern teens wouldn’t be captivated? But I appreciated how much credit Firekeeper’s Daughter gave to the maturity of the reader. I could see many teens I know appreciating the narrative, as well as many adults who normally scoff at YA.

The love interest, Jamie, was interesting enough but I don’t necessarily think he added all that much. I liked him, he was good enough to Daunis, and their relationship was both hopeful and realistic. The rest of the cast was dynamite, and I adored them.

Pacing

It’s relatively slower in the beginning than most YA—which is why I think it feels more like an adult read, because YA requires a bit more of a shotgun—but I was perfectly fine with it. I think part of it was the care and intention that Boulley poured into representing the aspects of Daunis’s culture, and how it informed her life. She created a fully formed lens that informed how she would make her choices and develop as a character. So in this sense, it felt about as tight of a narrative as it could have been. It’s five hundred pages, but more than that, itdeserves{’ ‘}five hundred pages.

My favorite part of the pacing is that the ending feels like a true finale, which I can’t say I’ve had the luck of feeling in a while. Edge-of-your-seat, one-twist-after-another. It saves up all the momentum from earlier pages to make the ending truly explosive, causing it to feel cinematic and epic. In that sense, the plot finally and completely won me over. If you’re a reluctant reader but can push through the first, slower half, it’s immensely rewarding and satisfying. As I mentioned, I’m impressed by the tracks that Boulley led, and how she managed to wrap them up neatly. The last 100 pages are where the WOW factor came in.

Cons

My few (very irrelevant) issues with the book were apparent within the first chapter or two, and I was glad when those largely disappeared. For the most part, I thought the dialogue had a tendency to feel stiff and unrealistic. It was clear that the dialogue had a specific purpose rather than embodying the way characters were supposed to — or should have — talked. That was a small aspect that could occasionally yank me out of the narrative.

I also tend to dislike when authors capitalize a bunch of emotions or groups in order to make them seem important (the equivalent of having a named clique of popular kids in a book about high school — most of the time, it just feels like a cop-out or a way to feel clever.) New Normal made sense, but there were a few, like Guy Lies and one that I’m forgetting right at the beginning that just felt like they were using the capitalizations to Make Something Emphasized. I’m generally of the opinion that if a writer has to do that, it means their emphasis or distinction isn’t strong enough on its own. I’m not sure; it’s just a pet peeve.

I did guess the perpetrators pretty early on, so that wasn’t a shock to me, but for this particular book, I don’t think it needed to be. Firekeeper’s Daughter was about the how, not the who.

Overall Thoughts

I’m impressed, and stunned, and had a bit of a book hangover after reading this one. It was inventive, compelling, respectful, and had flawed, warm characters I cared about. I’d highly recommend it, especially to those who normally scoff at YA (but how dare you.) It’s a winner, and I hope my readers appreciate it as much as I did.

As a note, a content warning if that is necessary or helpful for you — when I say this book pulls no punches, I mean it. There is sexual assault, gun violence, meth, and a lot of ugly subjects covered in this book. Approximately 4 out of 5 Native women experience violence in their lifetime.

“Five star read. Feels different from anything else out there. Had a few craft notes that don’t matter so much, as I loved it overall. I’m so glad this book has momentum right now. It’s really thoughtful and clearly a coming-of-age (both for individual and collective/tribal identity) and the thriller aspect makes for a riveting pulls-no-punches finale. Pacing-wise, it feels a lot like an adult fiction — it’s a slow build. ‘Tender thriller’ feels accurate. Everything felt well-proportioned and resonant — especially in the last 100 pages. Certain passages or chapters could be hit or miss, and my only critique related to unrealistic-feeling dialogue. The characters are dazzling and complex. WOW.” — what I said on my Instagram.

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Browse the full Words Like Silver archive on Substack here.

There is absolutely nothing I would love more than to be able to devote more time and energy to Words Like Silver, which has remained a one-person effort since age 13. If my work makes a difference to you, I’d love if you’d consider becoming a subscriber or upgrading your subscription below. You can also make a one-time donation on my website. Anything makes such a massive difference, and I appreciate the support more than you can imagine.

Book: Long Bright River by Liz Moore
Release Date: December 2020
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Format: eBook
Source: Library

Two sisters travel the same streets, though their lives couldn’t be more different. Then one of them goes missing.

In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don’t speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.

Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey’s district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit--and her sister—before it’s too late.

Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters’ childhood and adolescence,
Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.

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Why I Picked It Up

The God of the Woods had been in my orbit for a while, and Liz Moore alongside it. I really enjoyed her sophomore (?) novel and am looking forward to the TV adaptation. My sister said Long Bright River was actually her favorite, and so I wanted to go backwards into her list—which is often how it goes.

About the Book

Long Bright River focuses on a cop, Mickey, in a neighborhood of Pennsylvania heavily affected by the opiod epidemic. Her own sister’s been swept up in using, so Mickey tries to keep an eye out of her—and gets concerned when bodies start appearing that are shoddily-covered murders. The city claims they’re drug-related, but Mickey keeps expecting to see her sister’s name appear in the deceased. Over the course of the book, we uncover the unraveling backstory of the sisters and their own troubled upbringing; the street network Kacey’s gotten swept into; the distrust of law enforcement; the ticking clock.

The plot itself is interesting, again more of a slow burn than something teeming with intensity—more Mare of Easttown than Criminal Minds, as a procedural reference.

Characters

It may be the nature of Liz Moore’s plots, but I didn’t get a lot of personality from Mickey—not much of what she loved or cared about, beyond her son, which was a tender and touching relationship. I would have liked more, and do think her style and prose makes the story feel somewhat distant from the people involved, but a big part of the plot is that Mickey’s been raised to have hardness and shut down affection. (There’s an impactful part of the book where her son says I love you and she asks where he learned to stay that.)

Having now read two Liz Moore books, I’m starting to draw a pattern in which I never feel that close or called to her characters, but also find them somewhat satisfyingly complicated.

Gee, for example, the grandmother who raised Mickey and her sisters—there’s a complex loyalty and resentment there in that they’re all tied together but it’s not warm or resentful. It occupies a certain reluctant acts-of-service connection that can be frustrating but not worth giving up on, which felt true to life.

While I didn’t feel the sense of personal connection I normally prefer, I absolutely love rock-and-a-hard-place characterization, so appreciated the constraints there. You don’t have to agree with characters’ choices to feel sympathetic; they felt natural to their ecosystems.

Pacing & Tone

She doesn’t use dialogue markers, which adds to that muted literary effect.

The grizzled cop—True Detective: Night Country, Mare of Easttown—is a trope done well here. Much of Mickey’s reality was dampened or controlled by her family members, and figuring out where that was realistic love vs. hopeless restriction was interesting. Was her world made too small from the get-go because of the nihilism of others? Nature vs. nurture.

Overall Thoughts

Long Bright River grapples with the shades of gray in domains like harm reduction, motherhood and babies born addicted, law enforcement itself, etc. The narrative can be cold, a feeling doubled down on by the short, sharp chapters and lack of dialogue marks, but was constantly engrossing. There were one or two moments that surprised me. While I think I was expecting more from the end of the book—a sense of catharsis, or a real peak—there was a gradual escalation that was intelligent and interesting.

UPDATE: I started the adaptation, and it’s fantastic. I love the changes they make in shifting the medium, and it’s much more visceral and cinematic—to my style. Makes me excited for what they might do with The God of the Woods!

For fans of:

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore; Mare of Easttown (TV); Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley; Dopesick by Beth Macy; Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn; Sadie by Courtney Summers; etc.

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If you enjoyed this review, you might also like:

Browse the full Words Like Silver archive on Substack here.

There is absolutely nothing I would love more than to be able to devote more time and energy to Words Like Silver, which has remained a one-person effort since age 13. If my work makes a difference to you, I’d love if you’d consider becoming a subscriber or upgrading your subscription below. You can also make a one-time donation on my website or purchase a book for my library. Anything makes such a massive difference, and I appreciate the support more than you can imagine.

Book: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
Release Date: October 8, 2002
Publisher: Vintage Books
Format: eBook
Source: Library
Review originally posted in October 2024.

In the nine breathtaking stories that make up this collection, Alice Munro creates narratives that loop and swerve like memory, conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.

The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a “frizz of reddish hair,” just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girl’s practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family furniture stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. A young cancer patient stunned by good news discovers a perfect bridge to her suddenly regained future. A woman recollecting an afternoon’s wild lovemaking with a stranger realizes how the memory of that encounter has both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best—tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.1

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Why I Picked It Up

I read Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage because it was on a list of favorite books recommended by a guy I was seeing at the time.2 I don’t necessarily read direct recommendations immediately, although I do prioritize them. (I’m more of a mood reader, so will put something on a list then pick it up randomly down the line) but I slotted his recs into my list of library holds for my database to spit out at its leisure. I appreciate how reading someone’s favorite books can be an indirect, imperfect way of trying to understand and know them better, even when you know it’s an incomplete picture. It’s not just each favorite book at a time, per se, but also the layers in how they connect—a form of listening, so to speak. Or at the very least, it could at least be a conversation topic between two readers.

I knew of Alice Munro’s passing earlier last year, and had a conversation with the man in question about the pros and cons of separating the art from the artist. He was for it; I was against.

Upon Munro’s death, it surfaced that she was aware of (and in fact, actively suppressed the consequences of) her husband sexually assaulting her daughters within her household. (You can read about that and come to your own conclusions.) Horrifying. My initial thought was that I wouldn’t go out of my way to read something of hers because there are thousands of other books I want to read, and I always have a dozen reasons to pick up one versus another; while triaging my reading list and deciding who to give my limited attention to, I’d rather support better people.3

My Personal Connection

After finishing it, I also found out that the author Alice Munro lived in Port Hope, Ontario, the small town in Canada I grew up going to every July (and in fact, she lived in the same house as our family friends and neighbors.) I had dinner at her house as a child.

I’ve always known Port Hope as being—in addition to one of my favorite places—the town in which the recent IT movies by Stephen King was based, so I thought that was its sole literary connection. Also, Munro did live with her daughters in the final years of her life so: that’s another layer of intrigue to their complicated relationship.

Art from Artist

Because I was aware of Munro’s transgressions before going into the book, it was impossible not to read the collection through the lens of her own personal trauma. The stories deal with the texture of modern human relationships and often have this implied distance/disconnection between spouses and lovers.

Topics included what role your partner plays in your life, preferred distance or lack thereof, whether they see you fully and whether you want them to, the right stranger at the right time, the role of luck and timing, how your children affect the dynamic, etc,. etc,. The mortifying ordeal of being known! Several stories featured older women writer narrators (which is never my favorite to see from an author) but of course served as a mirror.

2026 Update: Sure enough, this book spoke to me deeply in the fall of 2024. But in the last two years or so, my feelings on Munro have only solidified towards the negative as more analyses and updates have come out about that particular case—an unbearable selfishness hoisted by Munro in exposing her children to horrors even for the sake of her own writing career. I may eventually read her others because of our Canadian familiarity, but I won’t review them. This one exists more as a time capsule, and I have other books and collections I’d rather champion. Some further reading on the subject:

• LitHub / “Crooked Parallels: On Alice Munro, Andrea Skinner, and My Mother’s Failure to Protect Me”

• The New Yorker / “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice”

• James Tussing / Literary Imagination / Johns Hopkins Press / “The Mysteries of Love: On Alice Munro”

The Writing & Pacing

Munro’s writing was lovely and insightful. I didn’t notice it much—which is a compliment from me, as I think blending prose into a story seamlessly is an impressive skill. I was most impressed by the complexity of the characters and relationships depicted. I loved a lot of lines that felt really honest and, again, hit at the exact right time for what I’ve been mulling over lately.

It’s been a while since I’ve engaged with a solid book of short stories, so I was pleasantly surprised that I had a good time with its pacing. It was just enough to get an expansive look at each dynamic, but each of the nine stories cut off at the exact right time to convey a distinctive flavor and theme (which is also how I aim to construct chapters within a novel, by the way.)

An Analysis of Each Story

A spoiler-y, possibly overthought breakdown:

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

The Story Itself: I didn’t necessarily love the story as much as others in the collection, but found it interesting. The writing style was a bit difficult for me to ease into—the furniture selling logistics, especially. The story centers on a woman who is going to travel to see her long-distance lover, with whom she’s been exchanging letters and hopes to eventually marry. What she doesn’t know is that the letters have been forged by two teenagers, so the lover she’s going to see doesn’t know her or care for her at all.

Theme & Notes: God, this story felt so cruel. In the end, the woman ends up marrying the man anyway. She shows up, he basically goes “sure, why not” as she’s nursing him back to health, and it reflects ironically on the role of luck and timing in fate and ending up together. I used to believe in soulmates, but now largely believe in multiple soulmates and the role of intention in steering you towards who you’re meant to be with. Once you’ve established compatibility, values, etc,. and all that jazz, it is a lot about the luck and the timing and being in the right mental place. At that point, love is choice. So love being choice in this one felt awful because it started from a place of dishonesty and ill will (the kids choosing to prey on the housekeeper’s desire for connection), but I guess all’s well that ends well?

I did also think to a feature I pointed out in Magnolia Parks that I appreciated recently, which is fiction that highlights everyone operating on limited information, and how you never know how much context someone has at a given time. The main thesis of this story seemed to be similar. There’s all that’s happening, yes, and then there’s every POV impacting how people see it.

Floating Bridge

The Story Itself: This story was my favorite. Something about it struck me. In it, a couple is preparing for the wife to enter hospice for cancer treatment; as she’s preparing for death, she and the husband run an errand where she runs into a man who takes her for a drive—and they end up kissing on the floating bridge.

Theme & Notes: I could tell where this was going pretty immediately. I thought the various elements of the story tied together beautifully and sadly. And there were some seriously stunning lines about the existential crisis I often mull over, which is that you can’t always correct the idea of you in others’ heads; at a certain point, the (mistaken) idea of you is all there is. Loved the nature imagery.

I did think about how we listen better to strangers than people we know, and how we often don’t give others the blank slate to constantly introduce themselves to us because we assume we know them enough already. The core longing of this narrator was so clearly about that issue; she felt boxed into a specific identity with her husband and now that she was dying, felt like she needed a secret or some dynamism—which she could only get with the stranger. I hate that cheating is the solution in this book for her, but understood the logic.

A pattern ultimately clear from her stories: characters didn’t feel capable of being known or seen by their spouses and often sought that elsewhere. In hindsight, I understood why she specifically might have written them that way.

Family Furnishings

The Story Itself: Family Furnishings came off as really bitter. In it, the narrator (a writer) has a strict separation between the version of herself she grew up with and the version of herself she’s chosen in adulthood. There’s a family friend, Althea, whom she resents for knowing the previous version, and the story tiptoes around this line.

Theme & Notes: Again, I think a clear theme of Munro’s work is that we don’t give people room to change once we’ve fixed this idea of them in our heads, and a lot of the negative emotion and vulnerability overflowing from her characters is sort of related to this frustration. There’s a fundamental lack of trust in the idea of connection itself, so you understand how these narrators build these specific rules of engagement with others and prefer to keep them at a distance or sabotage the connection so it doesn’t threaten their view of themselves. Solitude is always safer. Get to know new people so then you don’t encounter the cognitive dissonance of consolidating multiple aspects of yourself over time, especially those qualities in yourself that you don’t like. Etc,. etc,.

I also didn’t like how characters seemed to look for ways to exploit each others’ vulnerabilities (I’m probably just a kinder person) but Munro did point out that tendency across characters in multiple stories. Hypervigilance, maybe?

Comfort

The Story Itself: This story hurt the most to read. In it, the character goes home to realize that her husband Lewis, who’s been suffering from ALS, has finally made good on his promise to commit suicide. It was pre-planned, as he didn’t want to suffer a slow spiral. But then she starts looking for the note. How could he not have left one?

Theme & Notes: This one made me want to cry. Unlike Munro’s other characters (with the exception of the husband from the last story), Nina had this scrap of hope that she never let die. She knew Lewis was a specific way, that she chose him knowing they’d never be close in the way she wanted (and they did sort of circumstantially give up on connecting more—they were both ready to marry, so they got married) but she never stopped hoping she would really actually know him. That he saw her enough to leave the suicide note she secretly needed.

She mirrored him, most of the time. She saw that he shut down during sex, so she did as well, instead of trying to connect. (I see a lot of this sort of dating advice online with people claiming you should always “match [your love interest’s] energy,” so that felt parallel.) The shock was so well-done and awful and true to life: it was one day, like any other, but her life changed.4

Another story of specifically choosing a romantic partner to keep distant! I can imagine Munro in this story thinking through what her husband did—knowing there’s what happened, and then hoping, secretly, at the end, that somehow everything actually happened differently.5

Nettles

The Story Itself: Another cheating story—this time about a divorced writer reconnecting with her childhood lover.

Theme & Notes: Supposedly, women tend to romanticize future relationships and men tend to romanticize past relationships (according to editors’ analysis of the NYT Modern Love column.) I don’t know how true that is, but both methods are rooted in a delusional “idea of” someone, which primed my understanding of the collection as a whole. In this story, the narrator’s also sad about distance from her children which makes total context in the awareness of Munro’s household (again.)

I was thinking about a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s memoir about old friends being valuable because you can never duplicate the role of time, and the concept makes me very aware of who I feel close to because they’ve been around for a while, and how I think often as we age, we lose this innocent willingness to invest in someone we had during childhood. It was easier, maybe, to imagine knowing someone forever—and then we end up doing so because we’ve allowed the time to elapse. But we don’t necessarily pour into other people the same way in adulthood, maybe because we’re more afraid of loss. Munro also talked about the concept of treating things and connections and sex and all that jazz lightly, which was very relevant to me this year because I have been trying to be a lighter person and properly balance lightness vs. significance.

Post and Beam

The Story Itself: WOW. This one hit me. Damn!

Theme & Notes: I think Munro must have totally disassociated from her romance in order to function based on what we know about her life. This story embodies that to a tee in some very specific ways.

In one scene, the narrator is so viscerally, suddenly angry with Polly, a member of her family, for being vulnerable and pathetic. She’s sad and emotional, and the sight fills Lorna with complete rage. How dare you, she thinks. Then later, she is so guilty that she bargains with God in the desperate hopes that Polly hasn’t committed suicide. When she comes back to the house and discovers Polly okay, she’s both relieved and resentful. The ending of this story—holy shit. In it, there’s no greater punishment than living her current life.

Again, it’s so clear to see how Munro’s life may have influenced this one. I personally think a lot about prayer and bargaining (and that’s a concept I talk a lot about in my novel MOUNTAIN SOUNDS, about how I view prayers as a currency rather than limitless and how that idea of only being allowed to want so much at once—so saving up for what really matters—reverberates throughout my life.) The ending lines of this are absolutely stunning and so parallel.

You also see her meditation on the continuous self in a way similar to how it appears in Family Furnishings — that in leaving phases of her life behind, the character literally becomes a different person. She would rather stay distant from her partner so as to better separate out her life rather than to deal with the cognitive dissonance of change. (As someone who has historically been very bad with the vulnerability of change: I get it.) But wow. This story was stunning. I lied; this one might be a favorite too. But it did depress me that the main character just accepts that she is unhappy in her life.

What Is Remembered

The Story Itself: More cheating. On theme! Personally, each relationship dynamic within the collection was different but this twist started to lose some of its impact.

Theme & Notes: In this one, Munro’s character similarly specifically picks a marriage that she knows will make her unhappy because she does not have to confront her own weaknesses within it. (Repetitive.) So.

At this point in the collection, I was ruminating on how each character saw the person they cheated with—the stranger, the allure, the “ideal person” in their mind better than the one they know—as not only a falsified idea, but purely a conscious means to an end. They don’t actually see the person wholly, nor do they want to; if they did get to know them better, they’d probably lose interest as soon as they start getting closer because they become startlingly real.

I did love how in this one, she realizes at the end that the man she kissed is not who she thought, and he has his own independent identity. That was refreshing after a certain number of placeholders, and added a layer of discomfort to the story that made you think the character might start to see the light.

It’s better to keep chasing the idea of a person rather than a real person, the book says. And it’s easy to see why Munro might be wired that way in context. Survival, of course.

In the modern era, we can look at it through the lens of paralysis of choice and how that’s impacted modern dating culture, how there’s always a better option on the horizon simply because you don’t know them yet. The glimmer of possibility.

Queenie

The Story Itself: In this story, the main character visits a member of the family who’s run off with an older man to elope. Soon, however, cracks in their marriage start to appear, and the narrator observes its possible disintegration with wariness.

Theme & Notes: Excuse the length of this review, but I truly must book club. This story highlights the risk she sees in others’ relationships (and yes, there is more cheating.) In it is a warning about the so-called perfect marriage, how someone you marry who looks fine on the surface can suddenly turn into a stranger that makes you regret having run off in the first place. (Wonder why.) So it’s easier to just shut down and not make yourself vulnerable to that hope and connection in the first place.

Here’s perhaps where we see the most true-to-life depiction of Munro’s story, probably. The reasoning for why she’s been shaped the way she has, relationally. So very insightful

The Bear Came Over the Mountain

The Story Itself: In this story, the main characters fall in love and all seems well. The wife, however, eventually loses her memory. (It’s very The Notebook, in that way.) In her care home, she falls in love with another man, and grieves his absence when he eventually leaves her; the husband is distraught as he rewires his thoughts of his wife, the purpose of their relationship, and the role that mutual memory and intention have on making their love real.

Theme & Notes: This story probably wraps up some of Munro’s points pretty succinctly. This idea of someone you love becoming a stranger to you, and cautioning you never to have loved in the first place. This idea of the idea of someone being more appealing (or perhaps safer) than who they actually are. The self-preservation of withdrawing and just moving onto someone else as soon as anything gets vulnerable or messy, because you can only trust yourself. Loved the twist at the end.

Munro’s Fundamental Danger of Connection

When I read this book, I’d recently gone down a rabbit hole about attachment styles and “hypervigilance” because I had historically been “hyperindependent” in a way I was untangling via my first stab at dating in years of purposefully avoiding it. While I hesitate to psychoanalyze from a distance, it was my first experience meeting someone who (I guessed) was even more emotionally shut down than I was. So this book hit harder at the time.

Long story short, I see a lot of fears re: connection in Munro’s work. Her overall pattern seems to be that of creating distance between partners and spouses to avoid genuine vulnerability. In her stories, it’s safer and better to connect with strangers (who listen to you better than those you know—proven by science), cut off those who knew a previous version of you that doesn’t align with your current one, maintain strict boundaries of the self versus others, etc. Whenever her characters are vulnerable, they are either betrayed or become unfamiliar to themselves. They can’t trust their connections, so they don’t even try to.

It’s easy to see how Munro’s characters (and by default, Munro herself) might have adapted to this style of complete and utter distance as a survival mechanism, and how some compassion could have gone a long way in helping her (and her characters) feel safe connecting. I think the fundamental point of isolation in this work is so sad.

Then again, I do not forgive her for it.

I could quite literally never do what she did. To not keep her kids safe, in the aftermath, is unbearably and stomach-churningly horrific. Even putting myself in her shoes—I am sympathetic to the horror of the realization, but I cannot care if it cost her a spouse and self-image and some cognitive dissonance. She took the man’s side over her own children.

I can also get pretty meta about it and appreciate the role of writing itself as an activity for Munro, assuming this psychological framework. Even writing a book helps me process events and emotions in indirect ways, so I have a fresh awareness of how writing these stories might have functioned in Munro's life to coax these realizations from her, unconsciously or not.6 But damn.

Again, it's impossible not to view this collection and philosophy through the lens of Munro's tumultuous household. It was a unique layer to my reading experience, for better or worse.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is the right read at the right time for me. I'd be curious to read it in a few years and see what's happening in my life and how I might react to it differently.

For fans of:

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami; What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver; The Unfinished World by Amber Sparks; The Path of Most Resistance by Russell Wangersky; The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.

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Book: Sawkill Girls by Clare Legrand
Release Date: December 2018
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Format: Hardcover
Source: Bought
Review originally posted in 2018.

Beware of the woods and the dark, dank deep.

He’ll follow you home, and he won’t let you sleep.

Who are the Sawkill Girls?

Marion: the new girl. Awkward and plain, steady and dependable. Weighed down by tragedy and hungry for love she’s sure she’ll never find.

Zoey: the pariah. Luckless and lonely, hurting but hiding it. Aching with grief and dreaming of vanished girls. Maybe she’s broken—or maybe everyone else is.

Val: the queen bee. Gorgeous and privileged, ruthless and regal. Words like silk and eyes like knives, a heart made of secrets and a mouth full of lies.

Their stories come together on the island of Sawkill Rock, where gleaming horses graze in rolling pastures and cold waves crash against black cliffs. Where kids whisper the legend of an insidious monster at parties and around campfires. Where girls have been disappearing for decades, stolen away by a ravenous evil no one has dared to fight… until now.

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Why I Picked It Up

I’ve been looking forward to this read for a while. It was one of my top picks from ALA 2018 this summer,1 and I also featured it in my October releases spotlight. Still, Sawkill Girls is one of those books I wanted to own in hardcover.

As someone who flat-out refuses to order print books from Amazon, I suffered in my small college town (which doesn’t have any good bookstores.) Within a few pages, it was worth the wait.

2026 Update: I started watching Widow’s Bay this weekend, which takes place on an eerie, foggy island that reminds me a lot of Sawkill! While Widow’s Bay has a lot more humor than this one (so you won’t find that quality here), its scary moments, motifs, and superstitions align pretty cleanly—so I think any fans would devour Sawkill Girls if looking for horror more in that vein.

About the Book

Claire Legrand’s fierce setting and bloodthirsty premise make for an engaging read right away; throw in some twisted character dynamics and some stunning language for flavor. The Rock itself has a persona, and its sentience reminds me a little of The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater.

Characters

The plot begins with Marion, who introduces herself as a “mountain,” suffering through the recent death of her father. As a way of dealing with their grief, her family uproots to the money-saturated Sawkill Rock. Once there, the charismatic pull of the Mortimer family is obvious over the rest of the island. Their horses are beloved, and their daughter Val has a magnetism that draws everyone closer: a magnetism that Zoey, the tough and noble sheriff’s daughter, keeps trying to tell everyone isn’t normal. Thora, her best friend, wouldn’t be missing if not for having become best friends with Val. But as everyone keeps telling her—including her ex-boyfriend and best friend, Grayson—everyone on the island has a connection to the Mortimers, so she has no definitive evidence.

But when Marion’s sister, Charlotte, gets tangled up with Val, and Mairon starts hearing voices, their paths collide in ways that make it clear that whatever force is on the island is only getting stronger.

I’m weak for books with weird, alluring characters. Val was complicated, and so I actually ended up loving her. The Collector (bogeyman) and her mother beat her down, but she’s also so desensitized to the killings. She’s morally gray, and beyond well-written.

The book revolves around the Mortimers, and everything else that happens is an offshoot of that. Zoey and Marion were both great characters as well, for different reasons. Zoey was angry and outcast, but also pretty normal and relatable. Plus, her relationship with Grayson was confused but built on a ton of affection and history that was appealing and well-developed. Marion was grieving and tough, but also down-to-earth and accessible. Each of the points-of-view feels distinct but fits with the tone of the book.

Lore & Story

The lore and the pacing are executed phenomenally. On one note, the magical bits of it are folky and all-encompassing—my favorite. The setting feeds the atmosphere which feeds the language.

Sometimes in my experience with books like this that are so writing-heavy, it feels like the plot or logic goes to the wayside. With the exception of some looseness near the end, the narrative itself was pretty tight. It gets a little whimsical in individual moments, but the character dynamics, prose, and setting were enough to keep me rooted to the story.

The tone of the book does change. It’s always dark and sinister, with a lot of mysticism. In some patches, it gets brutally harsh. Still, the language softens it and captures a lot of the island persona. (”Place as character” is one of my favorite qualities.)

The bogeyman was terrifying. The force described was powerful and threatening, but never felt flat. Its behavior was always unhinged, and unsettling, and the verbs used to describe the creature made it really potent. (Weird compliment, but I’m going to roll with it—Legrand’s control and the precision of her language really shone in this regard.) Scary good!

I will note that although it's a powerful feminist narrative—and has gotten a lot of praise for its queer relationship, as well as its girls-fighting-with-girls focus, which is awesome—it could occasionally feel a little too aggressive thematically for my taste. Sorry to say it but at a certain point: we get it, men are evil.2 Certain elements of the plot felt too heavily manipulated to fit this theme, which I noticed only when it seemed to disrupt the flow of the story.

Overall Thoughts

Overall, I loved Sawkill Girls. It was so up my alley: chilling, malevolent antagonist; a gripping supernatural mystery; complicated, morally gray characters who were all equally engrossing; stunning writing; place as character.

Its quick pacing paired with the thoroughly dark, saturated atmosphere made it a singular read. It reminds me a lot of Stranger Things3 meets The Babadook meets Laure Eve’s The Graces, with some possession thrown in for good measure. Huge fan.

For fans of:

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater, The Graces by Laure Eve, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by April Genevieve Tucholke, Kill Creatures by Rory Power, Yellowjackets (TV), Widow's Bay (TV), I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea, and The Invocations by Krystal Sutherland.

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More From Words Like Silver

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Browse the full Words Like Silver archive on Substack here.

There is absolutely nothing I would love more than to be able to devote more time and energy to Words Like Silver, which has remained a one-person effort since age 13. If my work makes a difference to you, I’d love if you’d consider becoming a subscriber or upgrading your subscription below. You can also make a one-time donation on my website. Anything makes such a massive difference, and I appreciate the support more than you can imagine.

Book: Our Perfect Storm by Carley Fortune
Release Date: May 5, 2026
Publisher: Berkley
Format: Hardcover
Source: Bought

Frankie and George have been best friends since they were eight years old. Both passionate, impulsive, and headstrong—they’ve always clashed . . . and come back together. Until now. It’s the eve of Frankie’s wedding weekend, and she doesn’t know where they stand or even if George will show up as her best man.

Then, at the start of the festivities, in walks George. For one glorious evening, surrounded by her loved ones, Frankie’s life is finally perfect. But it all comes crashing down when her fiancé dumps her the next morning, leaving only a note as an explanation.

Crushed and confused, Frankie returns to her family’s home to wallow. But George has a different idea and a plan for healing Frankie’s broken heart. He wants her to go on her honeymoon. With him. For one week, to the lush rainforests and misty beaches of Tofino.

Frankie agrees, seeing the trip for what it really is: one last chance to repair their friendship. Even if it means unearthing secrets and long buried feelings neither knows how to handle. Even if it means falling apart for good.

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Why I Picked It Up

I've loved Carley Fortune books (most of them.) I also spend a few weeks every summer in rural Canada, making her cottage spotlight so gorgeous to me. Her books feel like that time of year, and I'll pick up each one without question. (PS. Love seeing the Canadian summer dream depicted in so many shows lately.)

About the Book

Friends and readers were rather eager to hear my take on this one; before I picked it up, I knew it had been polarizing. Someone told me they wanted to know my thoughts considering my reaction to People We Meet on Vacation, which is a reference point I understand in hindsight. Similarly to that book, the ending is obvious here, and you just have to decide if you like how Fortune gets there.

The book begins with Frankie, our bride, anxious that her best friend George hasn’t shown up to the rehearsal dinner. Despite being about to marry Nate, she can’t sink into the evening because she’s too preoccupied by George’s absence. When he finally does show up, she feels profound relief. (Tonally, the atmosphere also feels somewhat decadently wealthy—which is an interesting departure for Fortune.)

So are we really surprised Nate leaves her in the morning? He’s clearly torn up about it, but leaves a note saying he can’t go through with the wedding. And Frankie is baffled.

Flash forward a few months. Frankie’s moping, having cleaned up the mess and moved back into her family’s place. She and George grew up neighbors (literal boy and girl next door) and she’s mourning her almost-marriage. So when George finally shows up, deciding to take her on the prepaid honeymoon, she agrees. You can put together the pieces from there.

Plot & Execution

Now, I don’t love this plot because—for me—there’s very little believable tension built into it for me, which was my exact beef with People We Meet on Vacation. Having also recently picked up a Katherine Center book with a similar premise, I don’t think I like “abandoned at the altar” stories in romance, having tried a few.

What I did not like was that Frankie’s feelings for George were immediate. I wanted to give Carley Fortune more credit for the opening—what questions could she possibly subvert?—but the George obsession was both constant and willfully oblivious. It required a lot of suspension of disbelief, which just didn’t lead to much payoff for me. The whole point of romantic tension is that there’s tension.

What I said to my sisters is that I do have strong thoughts on friends-to-lovers book arcs by now. I love them, but I think they have to be crafted in a way that’s almost similar to unreliable narration. The stakes, for me, often have to involve a goal other than awareness being the issue keeping them from being together. The author withholding awareness usually reads obtuse to me rather than natural.

I wish their obstacles had been something more grounded in reality—how they handle conflict, what they want from life, something beyond the frankly ridiculous statements Frankie made about a supposedly platonic relationship that was so obviously anything but. There are so many reasons why friends might not act on being in love beyond not knowing they were attracted to each other.

[I shared a spoiler example on the blog so you can reference it if you’d like to book club.]

I don’t think you can have it both ways. Either George was her soulmate, so blazingly obvious to everyone, cut from the same cloth, etc. etc. Or Nate is a soulless wretch who left her grieving. To treat it like both—clearly idolizing George and obsessing over him at every turn, but simultaneously claiming the ex-fiancé was a terrible person for pulling one over on Frankie, how dare he—just made me not like her character or the couple together.

Like—I loved the way the ex-fiancé, Nate, was clearly grieving their relationship, so I hated the way Frankie spoke about him and treated him. He offered to pay for the full honeymoon for her; he bought her a present to help her write her recipes again, and Frankie only critiqued how it wasn’t to her preferences. Each choice that the narrative made about Nate was supposed to paint him as a villain, as someone who never quite understood Frankie enough, but instead I saw someone who maybe wasn’t the right fit but never stopped trying to make it work and was clearly devastated that it didn’t. His intention was kind, even if it wasn’t meant to be. What could this man possibly have done other than married a girl who was obsessed with someone else?

Frankie frolicking with George, constantly singing his praises, and then being rude about Nate’s cancellation of the wedding—I understand the ego sting, but I almost think Carley Fortune went too hard on the George love for me to see Frankie as anything other than pointlessly sour or even self-absorbed because of it. She never discussed loving Nate, really, only her being upset that he ended it. It almost would have felt more realistic if there’d been more of a balance here, even if it was just him embodying more values she mentally wanted from a partner or something. Having Frankie deconstruct her checkboxes or something would have even felt more like a realistic, sympathetic conflict.

The way Frankie and George got together even felt unkind. I would have loved to see someone, like a friend, even calling Frankie out for how she approached the wedding. Instead, everyone always deferred to her even when I thought she was in the wrong, which wasn’t as satisfying as a reader. Sometimes, you might be behaving like a brat! And your loved ones should point that out!

The book felt more similar to Fortune’s sophomore novel, Meet Me at the Lake, which tends to be one of her least popular, for similar reasons. Everyone around them very much believes exactly what they do. (”It’s so obvious he’s your soulmate!” while simultaneously agreeing with her irrational dissonance.)

Similarly, her hurt over George’s distance within their twenties as he built his career felt somewhat unrealistic. To expect a man who’s not your partner to build you into every decision just felt silly—or would have landed better if she had considered the romantic what-if versus it being a shocking revelation. Again, I feel the plot wanted to have it both ways in many decisions, which had the effect of making certain dynamics feel unrealistic instead. The ending felt too long.

I spent a lot of the book frustrated with the characters, and feeling that the arc itself wasn’t logically sound enough for what it was trying to do.

Writing & Style

Still, I liked the rest of it. I associate Carley Fortune with writing sensory books I can just sink into, which is still true. The beginning of Our Perfect Storm is much more summary than I’m used to from her, but c’est la vie. I appreciate when authors try to stretch their styles once they’ve made it big in a particular lane—like Fortune’s Canadian romances.

While I didn’t love the romance here, I love Carley Fortune’s construction of escape. The book takes place at a resort in British Columbia. There are decadent meals. There are cold plunges and hot tubs, storm-whipped winds, a doting concierge. The backdrop is stunning and I wanted to stretch those bits out. Oddly enough, she’s excellent with descriptions of food and temperature contrast, which makes each of her books feel visceral.

She painted a picture of luxury that I craved, and I loved reading the book because I love writing about boutique hotels within my journalism career. Sense of place in spades, still.

And Carley Fortune always shifts her lexicon just enough to make each deep dive a slightly different experience or aesthetic, making each of her books a treat to read. I’ll read for the pleasure of the senses for sure. It made me want to visit the Pacific Northwest.

Overall Thoughts

I disliked how the romance unfolded, and I didn’t respect Frankie much. I wished there’d been more friction—or more pushback against the main character wanting it to be both ways—and felt the plot required too much suspension of disbelief. I probably said “Girl, be so for real” out loud at least three times.

However, I adore Carley Fortune for her descriptions and escapism, and Our Perfect Storm is an indulgent book for that. Despite my many, many issues, I enjoyed reading it.

So—I’d read for a vacation, but not for the honeymoon. And I’ll of course buy her next.

For fans of:

Meet Me at the Lake by Carley Fortune; In a Not So Perfect World by Neely Tubati Alexander; People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry; Sunk in Love by Heather McBreen; etc.

Buy the Book

More From Words Like Silver

If you enjoyed this review, you might also like:

Browse the full Words Like Silver archive on Substack here.

There is absolutely nothing I would love more than to be able to devote more time and energy to Words Like Silver, which has remained a one-person effort since age 13. If my work makes a difference to you, I’d love if you’d consider becoming a subscriber or upgrading your subscription below. You can also make a one-time donation on my website or purchase a book for my library. Anything makes such a massive difference, and I appreciate the support more than you can imagine.

Book: Having It All by , PhD
Release Date: September 2025
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Format: eBook
Source: Library

What if you had a playbook for navigating life as a woman—the career decisions, the relationship questions, and the tradeoffs no one talks about? Whether you’re building your career or building your family (or both), this book gives you the data and the tools to get a better deal at work and at home.

Women today face impossible choices about careers, relationships, money, and time. And most of us are navigating them without a framework, a script, or even the full picture of what we’re up against. This book gives you all three.

In Having It All, Wharton economist Dr. Corinne Low explains how the system actually works—and gives you the tools to make it work for you. First, she breaks down the data on what’s really happening to women at work and at home. Then she offers a clear framework, practical scripts, and strategies you can use at any stage of life.

Inside, you’ll learn:
• Word-for-word scripts for asking for a raise, renegotiating with your partner, and setting boundaries
• Why women negotiate differently than men—and how to use it to your advantage
• A framework for career decisions: when to push and when to pivot to get more than you give from your job
• How to evaluate whether your relationship is a good deal, or ask better questions on your third date to find one that is
• How to structure your time, money, and energy around what you value

Dr. Low blends rigorous research with personal experience, including her own story of burning out as a working mother and rebuilding her life on her own terms.

In the tradition of Fair Play and Cribsheet, consider it the guide to life as a woman that no one gave you—backed by data, loaded with scripts, and actually fun to read.

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Why I Picked It Up

A bit of a tangent to start—I tend to be one of the quietest figures in a room (shocker, if you only know me from the Internet!) which has the occasional result of making people forget I’m present.

I spent a few years on the North Shore of O’ahu in a heavily-military friend group and, while I have complicated feelings on the institution and how it intensifies certain traits I perceive to be negative, I was very aware the whole time that I was their pocket feminist.1 Not at all saying that’s exclusive to that group, but the prevalence of certain flavors of masculinity were much more visible to me then vs. when I’ve ran in other social circles.

Sometimes, the men forgot I was listening to them still at a group event and got to the types of things they wouldn’t have said around their girlfriends, etc., like beliefs that women shouldn’t be given any leadership roles. That kind of belief occasionally manifested in their speech in small ways—like having strict ideas of male vs. female chores—and in a few larger ways that made me suspicious of their views over time, but this occasion was pretty cut-and-dried sexist in my view.

I fully support the choice to take on traditional gender roles (which this book addresses too) but believe it should be a conscious choice rather than the default assumption from a man.

I personally have no interest in a relationship that’s not consciously and actively a partnership, and I think relatively far ahead in that if I know from the get-go that I don’t have compatible ideals, I am uninterested—and in fact repulsed if there’s misogyny involved. I do not find it sexy for a man to view a woman as inferior.

Thinking through that experience and many others, I’ve been aware of this book since before it came out, and was excited to read it—but then I put it off for a year and a half or so because I kept getting angry over the idea of what it might say. There’s so much I would love to do, and so much structurally that can make that harder to achieve. Based on what opportunities I’d like from my own life: what should I prioritize when, and even in my home life? It’s one thing to know that information exists, but it’s another to be confronted with the data while scraping together what my next stage of life might look like.

About the Book

The book takes a tour through many of the issues that impact how women shape their lives at work, home, and in their leisure time. Some are dependent on personal choices, while others are imposed on them as a result of the assumption of certain default choices. (Ex: the data shows that it doesn’t matter if a woman has children or not; she receives similar penalties in loss of promotion opportunities before age 40; after menopause, the trajectories even out again—but the damage has already compounded within her career.)

Dr. Corinne Low worked as a consultant and had children with her husband, who worked in the same field, before becoming an economist at Wharton. Her experience parenting (and divorcing) and trying to achieve tenure while supporting another career—needless to say, it made her deeply interested in gender and its ripple effects in each of these domains.

This book asks the question: What would it look like if we stopped assuming the problems in women's lives are caused by women's choices and started looking instead at the structural, economic, and biological factors that are forcing and constraining those choices in the first place?

Chapters cover topics and phenomena like questions to ask yourself when falling for a partner, when to decide to outsource something to buy time (and how that dovetails with what your values may be), when to move for family, etc. etc. They're not outlined in a "by decision" way—so it doesn't at all feel pedantic—but the book flows through some milestones and life stages that start to accumulate exit options, and chats through how tipping points at each can determine what's important to you.

In my impressions, there’s a good mix of personal agency and structural context embedded in this book. It gives us plenty to do and consider, while still acknowledging the sea we swim in. I deeply appreciated how functional and interesting it was at any point. It never felt scary the way some of these can be, but was instead practical with enough warmth and understanding. The tone reminded me a lot of Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, which is a high compliment for me.

Have I sent highlights to friends? Absolutely. It’ll be a reference title going forward.

Tone & Voice

Dr. Corinne Low is an economist at Wharton, and I loved the way she approached her writing. It was solid and tangible and personal and advice-forward without feeling too self help-y in the “Girl, wash your face!” variety.2

She’ll bring up a topic, her personal frustrations or wins, the data and studies supporting it, and then go the further step of breaking down how to use that information based on what you want from your own life—your personal utility cost. As in, a job is only so useful to you as you can exchange it for money which then allows you to purchase things that benefit your utility.

The voice does use phrasing and vocabulary like “reclaiming your power” and “unique” a lot, which may feel woo-woo to you, but it didn’t feel like too much at any point—it’s just a particular lexicon associated with certain subgenres.

Going into this book, you’d assume it’s mostly about parenting, and that’s a heavy influence for sure. Cribsheet, a favorite nonfiction book of my older sister, is a comparative title for that reason. But Corinne Low doesn’t push you towards one mode of life or another; instead, she writes about how to figure out your values in the first place and then determine whether your environment is set up in a way that will create opportunities for choice.

It’ll Spark Personal Conversations for Sure

As a 28-year-old woman, many of my peers are moving to their “second cities” around now. Many of my friends are at the point at which they’re either aware the late twenties are a chance to try something new—which of course, is always true later, but becomes less elastic—or to double down on where they are.

Some of my friends are parents; some are getting married. Some are entering grad school, and/or have reached impressive career heights, etc. The people making big commitments are having to have structural conversations with their employers, families, partners, etc.: Do they want kids? If so, when? Should they invest in a graduate degree? Should they only do so if they don’t have to take out loans, if they want to be pregnant shortly afterwards? etc. etc.

It’s a very relevant book, even or especially for those who don’t want those factors in their lives—because, as the book points out, any woman of fertility age is impacted by those data biases in their hiring, promotions, treatment, etc. Choices now will lead to other choices later, and they don’t exist in a silo.

I was on the phone with a friend two months ago talking jobs and we were chatting about how we both frequently remind ourselves of the data showing that women are way less likely to go for roles they feel unqualified for, whereas men overwhelmingly have the reverse effect—making men more likely to have those breakthroughs. I try to remind myself of it whenever I sit down to scan job or opportunity requirements and assume I wouldn’t make it to the next round. Data like that is helpful in that it’ll boost your own personal checkpoint to try to close the gap—which is why I also love reading about unconscious influences to balance my brain—but Corinne Low is very clear that it’s not up to individual women to do so and that “leaning in” in the workforce isn’t the answer.

I loved her emphasis that every woman has different values to maximize, and how the answer isn’t automatically to swing more corporate or more toward the household. She filters each insight through the lens of this personal utility, and it’s a clear and useful prism throughout the book that’s definitely shifted my brain for the better. It is all about the tradeoffs.

Some Not-So-Fun Facts

Before certain men hop in my comments, keep in mind these are statistical averages and not automatically about you (said kindly.)

• It doesn’t matter if a woman is the primary breadwinner. In fact, they do almost twice the cooking and cleaning when they are. Men’s housework time hasn’t budged in over forty years.

“A man who earns only 20 percent of the household income does about the same amount of housework as a man who earns 80 percent.”

• Divorced mothers sleep more than married ones.

• Women are more likely to specialize in tasks when their marriages are secure.

• Parenting is more taxing in this generation than the one above.

“Between 1993 and 2003, the amount of time college-educated mothers spent with children nearly doubled from around twelve hours to over twenty-two hours per week.”

• People are generally happier when they make decisions oriented towards change, versus maintaining status quo bias.

“While men and women have a slight wage gap when they graduate, by the end of the chart, thirteen years out, the women’s ninetieth percentile earnings is identical to the men’s mean. I cannot emphasize enough how truly wild this is.”

“Something subtler and more insidious happened in the household during that time at home—the wife became the childcare expert. Now, not only does her husband have the slightly more promising career, but she is just better at soothing the crying baby, at knowing what needs to be packed for day care, which clothes the little angel has grown out of, what constitutes a developmental milestone, and when to call the pediatrician.”

• Firms statistically avoid giving women as many promotions during childrearing years even when those same women do not have or want children.

• In blind studies on resume, a female GPA of 4.0 was functionally equal to a male GPA of 3.75. Female resumes missing GPA were evaluated as if the number were at the bottom of the range, whereas male resumes missing GPA were assumed to be at the top. Sequential resume review vs. side-by-side evaluation always penalized women because bias tried to boost the man.

• Partners are more likely to move for a man’s job vs. a woman’s job, with his income increasing as a result of a location change and her income usually decreasing.

  etc. etc.

Overall Thoughts

Having It All was brilliant and practical and I loved reading it. I would love to bring it to a book club with friends my age, and I’d love to chat through some of its realizations (and suggestions.)

I think this is a book that some will be tempted to call a “woman’s book” which exemplifies the issue; I do think a lot of men should read it and face the numbers, and the fact that most won’t indicates why the book matters so much.

For fans of:

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman; Cribsheet by Dr. Emily Oster; Fair Play by Eve Rodsky; The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt; Labor of Love by Moira Weigel; Let’s Get Physical by Danielle Friedman; etc.

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Book: Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst (translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg)
Release Date: June 2026
Publisher: S&S/Summit Books
Format: eBook
Source: Library

Five friends from university; seven summer days in a lakehouse in Denmark. A chance to swim, catch up, and mess around like old times.

But the idyll is fragile. Lost without the uninhibited magic of their youth, Sylvia is left wondering what happened to the radical ways of living they embraced at university. Tensions rise under moonlit swims and wine-drenched dinners, and Sylvia is stunned to learn her old crush Esben will be getting married at the end of the week—a crush her monogamous girlfriend would definitely not approve. While the group sunbathe, cook, and flirt their way to midsummer night, new desires prove not everyone has left their arcadian fantasies behind.

An instant bestseller in Scandinavia and now translated into ten languages, Waist Deep is a modern Midsummer Night’s Dream that offers a provocative flourish to the perennial question: does growing up have to mean giving up on your dreams?

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Why I Picked It Up

I saw this one mentioned as a minimal summer read, and I pictured something like Beth Kephart’s Small Damages—smooth, lovely, sensory for its restraint, etc. with some interesting conversation. Apparently, Substack had been bubbling over this one, and I liked a lot of the European writers I’ve explored recently.

About the Book

When I got into Waist Deep, I started thinking about how it’s basically the literary version of Emily Henry’s Happy Place (which is a relatively standard premise anyway, but that I recently reread): friends reuniting for one week in which tensions and curiosities will bubble over. I knew it would likely be subdued and conversational, so was primed for that.

My Reaction

Admittedly, I rolled my eyes on the first page. Literally immediately, (one of) the main characters scratches her crotch and uses her body fluids as perfume. How provocative! It’s just edgy enough to make the book tip into “literary,” but I just don’t have much patience for that breed of obvious. Maybe this is just me, but one of my pet peeves in litfic might just be throwing in genital or masturbation imagery whenever a character wants to be shocking. (At one point, Sylvia masturbates to a daydream of her future self, which—I understand the point the book’s trying to make, but it feels faux-edgy.)

The book segues into gathering at the lake, at which point two characters announce they’re getting married (again, Happy Place?) and that causes various existential crises.

Writing & Style

The book is slow and conversational which I don’t dislike; the circularity of its existential crises remind me a little of the structure of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, which I loved, but I found the same style here to be a little insufferable. It can be far too lecturing, but simultaneously airy enough that it doesn’t lean in enough on its pros.

I thought some points of Waist Deep could be thoughtful and interesting, but that their effect was diluted by being far too stretched out and self-absorbed. On one hand, Waist Deep was intentional and self-aware about its own intellectual signaling and about “the deep need to be interesting.” But is that, in itself, interesting? I’m not sure.

But I wanted to like this one, so I really approached it looking for the good.

Are you just making a scene to make yourself seem interesting?

It's too quiet. Should they have music on? Would that be too staged?

Characters

Sylvia, one of the characters, is something out of a Milan Kundera book: unable to stomach the idea of commitment, and backed into her paradox of choice; she envisions all of the friends becoming polyamorous because she loves her girlfriend Charlie but doesn’t want to be tied down. She’s always crushed on her friend who’s getting married, Esben, and admires his family history of mental illness—assumed to be schizophrenia through his mother—as appropriately tragic. (Again, perhaps true that some to think this way, but it felt pretty faux-edgy to see on the page.)

It fills Sylvia with a strange, reverent envy, the thought of Esben’s proximity to true insanity. She fears that her own nettling mental health isn't great but in a less interesting way.

Perhaps an unfair read, but this book feels like it wanted so badly to be literary that I almost think it lost the quality. Instead, it became belabored even over 200-ish pages.

Waist Deep mostly focused on Sylvia and Quince; the other characters felt vastly underdeveloped, which made Sylvia’s insistence that they should all be in love a little surprising. Does she even know or like any of them? There was little affection directed towards others, mostly because she was wildly solipsistic. I think her obsession with creating a commune—as the book’s conflict largely revolves around Sylvia wishing they would all be polyamorous together, and how that would rescue her from all her own problems—would have landed if she’d in any way noticed anyone else beyond them being accessories, even if that was the point.

‘Why does everything have to be so alternative and complicated?’

Her push for polyamory, and the way it happened, was actually so annoying, although it did start maybe the (1) interesting conversation of the book.1 She could not at all even conceive of the idea that her perception of love and romance might be different from others’, and that made it hard to read because it was just pointlessly childish? Like, I felt for Sylvia in her pain and moments of doubt, but it was obtuse without intriguing me. The characters point it out, and Sylvia does herself, but it’s so...again, telegraphed...that the themes don’t feel all that interesting inside it.

That’s sort of why I thought it might be better and more effective as a short story—that the significance of Waist Deep could have been distilled into a scene.

Exploration of Gender & Identity

I did enjoy Quince’s exploration of gender identity, mostly because I’m very straight and hetero, so although I’m sure some of this conversation could be surface-level to those more in the know, points felt new to me.

The book is technically loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an influence I understood and agreed with, and the most poignant or atmospheric element of the book was Quince’s spiritual alignment with Puck and his playful, mercurial energy; that mood embodied an excellent vibe of the fluidity of fey that I’d actually been craving early this spring.

The rest sort of fell apart for me. There were some good parts, but it was hard to get over how insufferable Sylvia was. Her affection for Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Sylvia Plath made a lot of sense.2 While I prefer the Woolf to Waist Deep, those who consider it a favorite may see more connections to like in the latter that I’m missing.

Lines & Value

While I liked certain lines in Waist Deep, I just thought there wasn’t much to it. I thought there would be more complexity to the characters. I liked its meta-awareness about the desire for complexity and abstraction and performative intellectualism (the book talks a lot about it being a gathering of intellectual-types in that they all “worship subtle irony”) but I didn’t think it was vivid like I was promised (i.e. feeling summery) nor did it surface much beyond what it teases in the first fifteen or so pages.

How charming that he reads classics, that he doesn't pretend to like them but has his own opinions.

Fundamentally, I put in so much effort to find things to like to the extent that I really, really tried. Might even be unfair to other books I pick up and don’t extend this generosity to! It was just overall so flat to me.

I think Waist Deep would have been a lot stronger as a story or novella, because it didn’t fill enough as a book, even a short one; it dragged, and the lectures and circularity were genuinely insufferable and pretentious. It’s like being preached at by your most annoyingly out-there friend, or scrolling through various cities’ sublease listings that have a laundry list of personality requirements alongside their callouts. A normal conversation about a book is called mansplaining,3 and that’s sort of the flavor of the entire book.

And what does Adam look like? A propaganda poster for the superiority of the Aryan race, its natural, Germanic predatory instincts.

This is picky, also, but the dialogue and internal narration read to me as so telegraphed.4 Like, “Ah, yes, to the lakehouse we go—which we have been looking forward to since moving into our new apartment! Remind me why we wanted to see X friend again? Are you close?”

Even when poking at the desire to romanticize, perhaps showing how much the characters are aestheticizing, I’m not sure the excuse holds weight. Even if intentional, I don’t think that outweighs how it lands for me as juvenile prose.

There were maybe one or two vivid images, and I wanted more. It’s floaty enough that it wouldn’t take you more than two hours or so to rip through. I just think other books do it better in both setting and intrigue.

Overall Thoughts

And although it was self-aware about its pretentiousness, I’m not sure that meta aspect rescues Waist Deep from itself. The book felt highly stereotypical to me, but not in a fun, indulgent way—more like a weak caricature of litfic. According to Vogue, it’s the “quintessential Millennial novel.”

Sylvia did not look at other people; even her self-consciousness about her own predilection for internal hysteria got old quickly. Quince was flighty, but I liked how he was characterized.

The sexuality and the minimal European/Danish vibe was interesting, but I thought David Szalay’s Flesh handled similar themes in a much more substantial way. If anything, the book’s core struggle and feathery feel could be somewhat similar to Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but I’d just read that instead.

I wanted more from the lake and more from the connections. The pro is that I do feel my eyes have opened a little bit more to the discussions of transness or the concerns of similar characters.

The rest felt a little underbaked while simultaneously beating a dead horse? Sorry. I guess I’m not whimsical enough for this one—but if it was going whimsical, I would rather the book be more evocative?

I understood the self-consciousness of Waist Deep talking about wanting to be interesting to others, but I don’t think it was interesting as a book. I could see how many might project those insecurities onto the story, though. It’s horny, abstract, whatever. Plot-wise, the ending was abrupt, and it felt so surface-level contrarian the whole way through. But some people might really align.

The book talked a lot about how it was about yearning, but didn’t in fact portray all that much yearning, which is what I was looking for here. What I associate with the play is a sense of liminality or porousness that I think the polyamory conflict stabbed at but didn’t capture.5 In my opinion, book can’t really bleed in that way without more setup or connection, but it all stayed very up-top surface-level for me.

In summary: literary branding is a marvel. What we call deep! And I do love the cover, which has more feel to it than any of the text. It’s apparently getting a movie adaptation, which I can’t particularly imagine—but maybe the atmosphere will trickle through more there. I hope y’all love it more than I did if you pick it up, because I was hoping for more. Just wasn’t my cup of tea.

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If you enjoyed this review, you might also like:

Browse the full Words Like Silver archive on Substack here.

There is absolutely nothing I would love more than to be able to devote more time and energy to Words Like Silver, which has remained a one-person effort since age 13. If my work makes a difference to you, I’d love if you’d consider becoming a subscriber or upgrading your subscription below. You can also make a one-time donation on my website. Anything makes such a massive difference, and I appreciate the support more than you can imagine.

I can’t say Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman is indicative of my taste, but this gamified “LitRPG” SFF novel has sold 14M+ copies and had fandom lines out the door at BookCon, so piqued my interest.

The quirky humor, barrage of worldbuilding rules, and roll-with-the-punches plot intensity had me reflecting on how much DCC may reflect modern attention spans.

Also discussed:

• The Maze Runner by James Dashner

• Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore

• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

• The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

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Book: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
Release Date: May 2026
Publisher: Knopf
Format: Hardcover
Source: Bought

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.

Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

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Why I Picked It Up

Why wouldn’t I? The buzziest book of the year, the prism capturing most of our zeitgeist and conversation.

It’s a book I knew mostly of ahead of time, meaning that I did have pre-formed notions about how I felt about certain aspects of the plot and its development. I don’t think that makes my reading unfair, but it does make it lopsided in that I had strong thoughts on certain execution choices in fragments divorced from context ahead of time. I wasn’t itching to read it, once I found out how everything would unfold, but I did want to be able to participate in conversation. Yesteryear is more so a book I wanted to have read than one I wanted to read.

The marketing push obviously worked here. With its timely hook, cultural celebrity author, and adaptation buzz, Yesteryear has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and sparked infinite conversation, and Caro Claire Burke has gotten the publicity push of a lifetime. The positioning of this book is brilliant, and its attention deserved as a conversation-starter.

I could write three reviews of Yesteryear: the experience of reading, its execution and creative choices, and then unpacking some of the position it occupies within the cultural ecosystem. I hope that what I’ve landed on isn’t too all over the place.

About the Book

Yesteryear is a buy-in book, meaning that a lot of whether certain elements work for you or not will depend on how intentional you believe the author to have been in composing all its details. I sort of land on a bit of both; there are aspects of the book’s construction I’m willing to bet are purposefully engineered by Caro Claire Burke as meta commentary—as she’s clearly highly accomplished and intelligent—but that doesn’t excuse every element that I perceived as weaker.

(Then, of course, are you looking to pick at Yesteryear—to examine it in the context of its cultural commentary—or do you just want a good time? Mileage will vary, again. It’s a perfect high-low book in that way, which is different from being solely upmarket.)

There’s some of the execution, or what I perceived to be plot holes, that I’m guessing was just messy: the natural trade-offs of a hugely ambitious book that attempts to do a lot at once. I did enjoy it more than I expected to, although I did have plenty to pick at! I agree with scathing critiques I’ve read as well as glowing, heaping praise. Which makes Yesteryear an interesting case—a bit of a mood ring, this one.

Voice & Tone

First, I have to say—the first hundred pages or so are rougher than the rest. There’s a lot that frustrated me at the beginning about the style that faded away as the narrative settled into a rhythm. The beginning is very harsh, and (in my opinion) choppy, with a lot of sentences cutting into other thoughts. Very few authors are allowed to break certain rules that Burke does, and that’s because this book was anointed from the get-go. It’s also immediately clear that residing in Natalie’s head is a very hateful place to be.

Now, it sounds like one of those descriptions you can’t give yourself, but I’m a very kind and rosy person. I look at people and see the good (and/or try to.) So the angry, bitter, warped way Natalie looks at people is just an unpleasant way to spend a few hours. I didn’t enjoy being in the head of the character, and that does impact how much I like the book. Unlikeable characters per se aren’t going to do that to me, but hateful characters are specific, and that’s separate from my feelings about characterization, plot, prose, etc.

I registered pretty quickly that the voice itself wasn’t for me, which wasn’t about Natalie being unlikeable so much as pacing choices and the flow of the delivery of information. Yesteryear has such a strong, cinematic hook (already in adaptation) that I did want the writing to match its promised level of immersion. It’s okay that it didn’t; the construction is simply not to my taste. I never felt in-the-moment with Natalie, and you could argue that’s a product of the distance and disassociation (an argument people also make for Madeline Miller’s Circe, which I didn’t like) but that still impacts my connection to the writing.

There weren’t moments in the prose that surprised me and I personally didn’t love the small interjections of interviews or commentary about the children. None of it felt natural, which you could argue makes a statement in itself. It felt like telling or like a constant fourth-wall break, which just isn’t a style I enjoy. (Of course, you could also say—perhaps generously—that the book attempts to shape a constant sense of performance.) As a tiny example, I loved the bit of the “gnat” in Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs but didn’t love the equivalent version: awkward product placement in Yesteryear. Some lines were also very obvious or heavy-handed, although sometimes surprisingly funny.

Pacing

In terms of pacing, it’s somewhat fascinating. We almost can’t evaluate Yesteryear in the regular demands for fiction because Caro Claire Burke had such an unusual debut experience. She got many, many pages of setting up normal—day in the life, in influencer terms—vibes before we reached the hook. I’m not bothered by a delayed inciting incident, but I do think it’s a long time to get acclimated to the voice without relief.

It is also a lot of flashbacks to Harvard, and a slow build of how her life constructed. Originally when it was pitched and publicized, I thought it would be a time-travel narrative or a thriller. I don’t necessarily think it’s either.

The choppiness does “make sense” in the end based on how it all wraps up, but that doesn’t smooth down the reading experience in the way that I’m looking for; it’s still a quality of the book worth evaluating for me and my taste.

I thought I wouldn’t love the ending, but I thought the slow build of suffocation—combined with Natalie’s flashes of inspiration or clarity—was actually fantastic.

Now, Let’s Talk About The Satire Problem

I have strong thoughts on satire and what makes satire effective, and feel about Yesteryear as I do about Yellowface by R.F. Kuang: that it is essentially immune from criticism in an annoying way. There are methods of angling a so-called satire that essentially insulate a book from being disliked for its execution.1

For each person noting a subjective quality of Yesteryear that didn’t land for them, there’s another piping in to say “You just don’t know how to read unlikeable characters!!!” The reaction boils down to whether you think Caro Claire Burke (/insert author here) specifically engineered each part of the book to some universal effect, even possible weaknesses. Thus is the infallibility of a big swing.

As a reviewer, I kind of hate that, but respect the rarity of how a shield like that develops around a given book: a particular combination of some tricky factors that build that chemistry, some out of an author’s control.

Was continuity a structural problem where things slipped through the cracks, or a method of characterization? Was fact-checking a problem here to the extent they changed setting details between the ARC and the final copy? Should you read into external posts and claims by the author to decode the content of the book, or “let the book stand for itself”? There’s no real right answer, but the book is now essentially buffered because people will say you just didn’t get it, regardless of whether or not it’s “true” satire.

Books like these can be propellers of conversation, which is an aspect of reading I enjoy almost as much as the books themselves:

The Tornado of the “Unlikeable Female Character”

Natalie—our narrator—has essentially made herself so miserable in pursuit of traditional good ol’ American ideals that she sees no way out, and so forcibly doubles down.

My personal favorite way to write an anti-hero—as done by Suzanne Collins in The Ballad of Songbird and Snakes—is to write “rock and a hard place” characterization in which every decision chips away a little more at morality. Natalie’s characterization is more so a constant attempt to put a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, the bullet wound being her initial, stubborn insistence on the tradewife lifestyle. In some ways, I appreciate that she is constantly doing her best, even though reasonable readers will register that her energy is being funneled towards the “wrong” values.

There are one or two tipping points at which she realizes that she’s well and truly fucked up the trajectory of her life, but she’s too prideful to be able to backpedal. You do feel sorry for her, even though she’s done it to herself.

Sleep, breastfeed. Breastfeed, sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Breastfeed. Cry. Breastfeed. Sleep. Kill yourself. No—sorry. Sleep.

Admittedly, I Expected More from the Political & Cultural Commentary.

I agree with broad critiques that Yesteryear can feel one-dimensional and that it punches down a lot. Natalie is interesting, but I don’t feel her character is dynamic enough for the messages it’s trying to convey—but, of course, the conversation sparked by this book pretty much covers that, so does it really matter if it’s on-page?

I had certain moments where I perceived it to be the author speaking rather than the character, which is likely an unfair assumption on my end; still, those pokes contributed to my agreement that there was some punching down that perhaps diluted the effectiveness of Yesteryear as satire, and instead could make it feel oddly nasty or even personal at times. Natalie occasionally felt like a scapegoat or vehicle rather than a character.

Prime example: without a strongly articulated religion,I didn’t think the lines about God or etc. were all that interesting to me. Plenty of people have argued that the vagueness and inconsistency of Natalie’s spirituality are purposeful, or unimportant, but I actually don’t feel that holds enough weight. I do think a stronger sense of cohesion or internal logic here would have gone a long way in alleviating some of the problems I ultimately had with Yesteryear.

Luckily, Natalie spends a solid amount of the book in survival mode, splitting over her own dissonance, so it’s easy enough to ignore. While you can argue the aestheticization of religion was intentional, I thought the way it was layered in felt cheap to me rather than simply surface level, so I almost wish Burke had steered clear altogether if she wasn’t going to engage with those topics more, because she is a deeply smart person and I’ve thought many of her online takes have been great. Some of the book’s shining moments are when it talks very frankly about political engines and similar.

[Working in politics is] actually one of the few positions of power where it benefits you to underthink. If you don’t think too hard, you never get rattled.

One aspect I loved that Caro Claire Burke handled brilliantly was in displaying the slippery slope of desperate quick fixes to maintain this impossible image.

A prime example: panicked about the ineptitude of her husband, Natalie diverts his ambition of becoming a schoolteacher by throwing out an excuse about the schools indoctrinating children; Caleb then goes down a rabbit hole online and ends up being sucked into a red-pilled culture that then has incredibly negative ripple effects on the homestead. (Also, her resentment towards Caleb being essentially a man child was so awful, real, and smart. As well as the part where she realizes she has no ownership over the lease and is digging herself further in.)

The best moment of the book in terms of impact and horror and commentary was probably the first time Natalie realizes that she’s married the wrong man and that—due to both her values and her pride—she is forcefully stuck in a life she doesn’t want forever. Very, very well done, in my opinion.

This was the moment the crisis became clear to me. This was the moment I realized my husband was an actual, honest-to-God idiot: when he suggested with all the sincerity in the world that I might like to bring our two-week-old newborn with me on a jog.

Also, she probably nailed the psychology of how you start thinking in terms of an audience, even if it’s in a dissociative way to get through daily life i.e. Natalie’s invisible “Angry Women” mechanism.2 The presence of a camera or the social media element was almost just a vehicle; that split would have happened regardless, but of course intensified.

I do agree with some critiques I read too, however, that the book ultimately falters in how it fails to attach Natalie’s action to broader cultural mechanisms in that it places nearly all blame on her as an individual, so I would have loved more engagement there. Does it land as satire without that? Is it too easy to hate her because Burke detaches Natalie from all possible social factors and just makes her terrible? She nails some of the reasons we like influencers who frustrate us, which I liked after recently reading the nonfiction version of this via Fortesa Latifi’s Like, Follow, Subscribe.

These women wanted—no, they needed—perfection from me. After all, the tighter the stitching, the more soothing it is to pick apart at the seams.

The goal of an influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.

Book Club with Me Here—Including Spoilers!

Scroll if you don’t want to be spoiled!

This book is a fantastic book club pick, whether or not you enjoy it. For that reason, I’d say it deserves the sales? Love it or hate it, people want to talk about it and do. It’s fun to be part of a behemoth moment like this in which everyone is analyzing the same moments and scenes and lines.

It’s a timely, massive book, and I fully understand after reading why everyone has something to say about it. The premise and the execution and the subjectivity of everything baked into it make it conversation-worthy, even if not all that conversation is good. I’m not sure I really loved reading it, but I liked getting to dissect it with friends.

• I don’t think Caro Claire Burke knew what to do with Natalie’s mother, and the family element here felt weirdly inconsistent to me here. Her mother seemed to be whatever she needed for the plot in any given scene even when her actions were wildly contradictory and slippery.

• Quotes by the author in interviews have made me somewhat skeptical about the intentionality of some moments I thought were messy and not constructed—but then again, a book does become an entity greater than oneself so c’est la vie.

• I thought the most brilliant part of the book was when the family is watching Shannon’s interview and someone tells Natalie to stop, and you realize she was saying all of her most hateful internal narration thoughts out loud without her registering. Damn!

• Psychological break ultimately made sense in how it was executed and delivered more shock than I expected, but I’ve also done a lot of serious research, interviews, etc. unpacking psychosis and how it’s used in fictions—so I have really strong thoughts about using it as a plot device.

• I don’t like the book’s engagement with “real person fanfiction” i.e. Ballerina Farm, and think teasing Yesteryear as related is actually pretty morally suss (in Gen Z terms.) I do not like how Caro Claire Burke has handled questions this way online. Regardless of your personal feelings towards Hannah Neelemann, I think marketing any association is deeply unfair, especially understanding the current lack of media literacy re: what’s real vs. fiction, which this book should know because a big theme of it is performance!! Yes, tradwife influencers do some real harm, but I don’t think the way this association has been targeted is fair to those involved. Just my line.

• I was a liiiittle frustrated that the book didn’t have any consideration of a speculative element. I truly thought before its release that Yesteryear would be more of an Outlander situation, and while I understand Natalie’s consideration of various possibilities, the marketing did have me expecting some engagement with the idea of time travel versus not really touching on it at all. I was expecting, if anything, it to take a tack similar to Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly in which you could make a case either way. I felt a bit cheated as a reader that it wasn’t even acknowledged.

Overall Thoughts

Do you honestly think there are no consequences to performance?

There were some really stunning (i.e. startling) moments in Yesteryear, which makes it a fun one to book club. Regardless of where you land on how it ends—and I feel absolutely awful about having accidentally spoiled it for one of my literary agents over lunch—you’ll definitely say “Oh my God” at least twice.

I agree with plenty of glowing reviews, and I also agree with some of the very scathing takedowns or notes debunking the research behind it. I give credit for Caro Claire Burke for attempting to do a lot but simultaneously wish she had tried to do more because a good bit felt surface level. I thought it did a great job dealing with the impossibility of determining the nature vs. nurture of how some of these dynamics develop—how one choice leads to another leads to another.

As a reading experience: I never loved the voice and prose—entirely separate from me liking the character or agreeing with the plot direction—but was much more invested in it than I expected to be, which was a win. (I tend to be voice-forward in terms of what I end up liking.) I don’t think it’s a masterpiece, nor do I think it’s worthless. It’s a conversation-starter at the very least, and how much you love it will depend on what you value within your books (which is always true, but for this one more than most.)

PS. I do love the cover, the title, and the electrifying hook.

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This summer, I’ve been chipping away at a draft. It’s not technically a revision because I turned in my latest to [redacted] this spring then immediately hated what I’d done. But! I’m giving myself grace for that being the first time I’ve ever done a revision on “the other side” because I overthought everything.

Over the last—say year and a half?—I always seem to always be writing from a place of guilt in feeling behind. It takes too long for a new idea to click, or I spent two months reworking a draft for it to feel wrong. Now, I’m very happy with what I’ve landed on for this latest, but my new [redacted] has the old draft that I don’t like, which is now outdated.

So I want to get them the new one before they dive in, but I was also told that they wouldn’t get to it until later in the summer. “Later in the summer” is here, and realistically has probably passed, but nobody’s in my inbox asking for it…so I assume I’m not in trouble yet. I’ve taken too long on this.1

In fairness, I was also actively applying for and interviewing for jobs and working on unpaid test or professional projects that will help my trajectory/stability/ability to support myself writing, which takes all my time and energy, so I’ve been worn down without reward.

After a few years of doing it moderately successfully, I’ve learned freelancing stresses me the hell out for no good reason and I now have the capacity to go in-house, so I’d like to lift the burden from my book of needing it to pay my bills now. (In the future: hopefully. Right now: I need a life that’s not narrowed down to a Google Doc.) Even having a [redacted] then has me mentally chopping up one lump-sum into living expenses in a way that’s not good for me anymore!

I’ve also inhaled a bunch of books this summer, per usual. I always read the most in July. Tracing patterns here is so important; I never quite entirely off my author brain when reading because I like analyzing craft, but I think a lot of learning to write in whatever way you like is a direct result of absorbing and internalizing unspoken rules, cycles, etc. Like mirror neurons: a sense of rhythm and understanding and style you can’t get any other way.

Graceful

Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life by Mason Currey

A loose voice note on trying to be creative (and maintain a standard of living) in a landscape that frequently makes both feel impossible, as told by Mason Currey’s upcoming release, Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life…

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8 months ago · 4 likes · Grace Smith

Some notes from the latest:

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Book: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Release Date: 1992
Publisher: Vintage Books
Format: Hardcover
Source: Book of the Month

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

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Note: This review is book club-style, meaning it contains spoilers! If you read it on my website, you’ll be able to see redacted black bars over the spoilers, so head there if you haven’t and would like a spoiler-free review.

Why I Picked It Up

This book is constantly referenced and aestheticized. It is, as the blurb and its lore claims, a “modern classic” or canonical work, spurring the growth of subgenres like dark academia. You can trace its influence—intentional or echoed—throughout titles across adult and YA, as well as across online discourse grappling with the rise or threat to intellectualism in various short-form video formats and platforms like Substack. Many people love it.

Considering my taste tends to balk at titles I view to be too harsh or bleak, I wasn’t sure The Secret History would be to my taste based on what I’ve heard, but wanted at some point to read it and cross it off and give it a chance.

A few short ties in include a recent fascination with Bennington College (Donna Tartt’s alma mater) via authors like Sally Mann and recently Caro Claire Burke.

I also just reread A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro, an all time favorite, and she referenced The Secret History as an influence—which makes sense considering the structure of how Jamie and Charlotte’s history is conveyed.

And at this point in the summer, I am helplessly bored and briefly stuck at my parents’ house with nothing to do but work and then read when I am too tired to work, making it an A+ spot to skim through my various collected books and pick out a few that I’ve been “meaning to get to.” Thus: The Secret History.

About the Book

First—and I do find this interesting—the book starts with the dedication to Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote American Psycho (which I utterly abhor.) So the mutual preference for characters doing cocaine and committing murder is there—a certain propensity for shock factor as depth.

The book starts with Richard, a transfer student, deciding to head off to a liberal arts college in Vermont. He studied Ancient Greek before his transfer, and Hampden soon tells him that he cannot join the single Greek class on campus. In a spell-binding, Twilight-esque way, he spies this group of five other students: Bunny, Henry, Charles, Camilla, and Francis, and simply must be a part of it, desperate for their approval and for entrance into such an exclusive little club.

Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

When he's finally allowed to join, he has to withdraw from all his other classes. As the registar warns him, Julian (the intoxicatingly brilliant professor) runs his own little school within Hampden, becoming their singular tutor and ignoring mundane requirements like graduation requirements. He's essentially paying $30K/year to learn from one person.1

Characters

People will refer to the characters in The Secret History as being morally complex.

Characterization-wise, Richard feels like any of a handful of distant, clingy narrators who doesn’t have much of a personality beyond his desperation to be included among the charismatic elite. It’s not my favorite dynamic, to be honest. As a group dynamic, the students are interesting, but individually, none of them had too much that was compelling except for (in my view) Bunny and Henry being the stars here. The Secret History is called very character-driven, but I almost felt I didn’t know any of them by the end much either. Cheerleader effect?

The sinister way in which Bunny’s character developed over time was the most compelling to me—this insidious sense of entitlement that was deeply rude. By the time Richard is talking mid-book about how he can’t bring himself to view Bunny negatively because he’ll recall his boyish smile or similar, I was full on the I-hate-Bunny train. Which is partly the beauty of the book—Bunny could be absolutely awful, but that doesn’t give the other students the right to determine his fate. (Since they tell you at the beginning of chapter one that they murder Bunny, this isn’t a spoiler.)

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

Belonging to the classics group almost started as a challenge that Richard's ego won't let him bail on, and now they're all in too deep. Bunny's reaction to feeling on the outs—to double down on all the qualities that make him insufferable, specifically his exploitation of money—is immature and horrifying and somewhat realistic even, that he intensifies the worst traits that started his alienation in the first place. Bunny creates the dynamic with his willingness to exploit the others, but their hidden secret (murder during their Bacchanalian reveling) makes them increasingly desperate, but Richard goes along with it because he considers these people his friends when they really aren't all that close.

They have a shared familiarity and the intimacy of attending the same classes, but there's not warmth between them so much as competition and a desperation to be in-group. It starts out as a natural, evolutionary instinct, but then turns into a pointless cling to misery.

‘You don't feel a great deal of emotions for other people, do you?'
I was taken aback. 'What are you talking about?' I said. 'Of course I do.'
'Do you?' He raised an eyebrow. 'I don't think so. It doesn't matter,' he said, after a long, tense pause. 'I don't, either.'

Levels of maturity vary, but those reading this may resonate with the strange hunger to be anointed even when you can intellectually understand that being a part of the group is not actually that great. These people are not that nice, and they are not all that good to each other, and they are constantly in fact resentful of each other, and their outings are somewhat not all that fun either. The magnetism was well-spun, but I would have loved a little more grip to any of them.

A small, picky detail too: I absolutely loathe the twin storyline for many reasons. I will say, I was also expecting slightly more from Julian! More Bacchanalia.

One of my favorite, most telling details: Charles being frustrated that Henry spends more time figuring out which book will look most impressive to be holding when going in for police interrogation instead of actually worrying about being questioned about a mysterious death. (Meta, perhaps.)

Tone & Voice

Written in the 80s and published in the 90s, The Secret History is almost eerily old-fashioned in its aesthetics, which, again, is partly why it captivates this specific dark academia aesthetic—boozy ol’ boys’ lunches, etc.

There was a grand piano, too, and Charles was playing, a glass of whiskey on the seat beside him. He was a little drunk; the Chopin was slurred and fluid, the notes melting sleepily into one another. A breeze stirred the heavy, moth-eaten velvet curtains, ruffling his hair.

There’s a stiffness to the narrative that makes it deemed literary, and I even think buildups like “My name is” at the beginning—a rule few other authors are able to use—contribute to the signaling that The Secret History is an intellectual book. I thought about how Jennifer Lynn Barnes constructs her books using gossip theory and the human evolutionary instinct to be “in on things,” and that’s very much part of it.

The book is at times unbearably pretentious, which is part of its appeal both thematically and as an identity-signaling kind of read on the Internet. It’s also intentionally so, because it comments on the need for pretension in an often self-aware way. People love the Classics references á la Babel or Boys with Sharp Teeth, and the effect is that the narrative feels rather rather lost in time. I’m not sure whether the self-awareness works here or is functions to gloss over some of its more muddled moments.

I can appreciate its construction on the elegant, sinister level of it being somewhat disturbing the whole way through, which did make me realize that I don’t actually enjoy the reading experience even though I appreciated the autumnal atmosphere, the subtle push of the morals bumping against the book’s questions, etc. It’s a lot to sustain over six hundred pages.

Richard’s refusal to ask for help and insistence on maintaining appearances to the extent he almost froze to death that winter were truly horrifying to me, and the effectiveness of that lonely academic imagery actually put me in enough of a funk that it was hard for me to sleep that night. Tartt writes about that winter staying in his bones and haunting him, and it’s a bundle of imagery and isolation that lingers.

It almost reminds me of this quality from Murakami’s Norwegian Wood: the belief that they’re meant to be unhappy, and thus double down on the imagery surrounding that separation from others—except in this case, it stems from them viewing others as lesser and less intellectual. Congratulations on being special; now here is your prize.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think?

And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it.

Regardless of my personal taste, I understand how the book has been so captivating to many and can appreciate many elements of its construction; it's very specifically moody. I did also love this section about studying ancient Greek, which really made me feel the love for it:

Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.

Pacing & Plot

I do think it could have been much shorter, and that my interest majorly fell off in the second half. At that point, the spiraling and anxiety surrounding the murder and its coverup got repetitive, and it took a lot of effort for me to continue reading. I can’t say my reading of the back half was as careful or invested, and a good bit felt more self-indulgent than the beginning. I might be too old here in that I don’t think the characters are so much tortured and morally gray as they are immature and short-sighted. (I don’t need my characters to be moral or even smart, but I think it’s important to point out considering how the book is hailed as oh-so-deep.)

Granted, they’re college students still, but there’s not enough motivation for them at any point—no light at the end of the tunnel. With the plot stretching the way it did, I would have liked to feel more connected to the characters because I still left the book feeling like I didn’t get to know anyone other than Bunny.

It sounds strange to say “outside of the murder,” but The Secret History does somewhat falter on how casual or intense it chooses to treat the choice to kill someone, which can be disorienting. Perhaps more intentional than I read it to be? I think in some ways, Tartt may not have been decisive enough in her plot, which contributes to the sense the back half drags or is plodding.

I did want more cultishness or more targeted darkness versus the more diffuse devolution depicted. The themes are interesting, but I wanted more from them, and think if the book had been cut down more than it would have felt more distilled in that realm. But—different time, different standards, so I can recognize how that’s a subjective personal preference.

Overall Thoughts

The Secret History is haunting and well-curated and occasionally insufferable and a little long, but I respect its impact and found the insularity and social dependence depicted within it to be deeply interesting. The morals, and sense of entitlement, can be dark, and I see why it attracts aestheticization—especially because Richard himself admits this attraction to beauty. There were also some very pretty lines.

Maybe that’s why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do.

I do think it could be great, but not flawless, depending on definition, and it takes on a veneer beyond itself because of its role as an identity signifier for capital-r Readers. What belonging to the group says about you is what makes its existence intoxicating—the theme of the book, and much of the basis for its appeal. I did think it would be and get deeper. I could see why it endures, and understand why its specificity makes it a core text across certain genres.

In fairness, I may be more like the “lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath” towards whom Richard was condescending. I believe too much in neuroplasticity to have much patience for this particular strain of melancholia and self-indulgence sustained for so long. (Upon encountering the “male philosopher king” archetype laid out in this book, that tracks; usually, my impression is that they may benefit from therapy.)

For fans of:

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, Babel by R.F. Kuang, Boys with Sharp Teeth by Jenni Howell, Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, American Philosophy by John Kaag, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.

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Browse the full Words Like Silver archive on Substack here.

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Book: On the River Styx by Peter Matthiessen
Release Date: 1991
Publisher: Knopf
Format: eBook
Source: Library

Since the 1950s Peter Matthiessen has written fiction and nonfiction of elemental power and moral vision, including the acclaimed novels At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga and works of naturalism and exploration like the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard.

This stunning collection of short stories, available for the first time in paperback, spans more than three decades of writing by one of the most acclaimed literary voices of our time.

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Why I Picked It Up

I keep a pretty healthy rotation of short stories in the mix. When I tally them up on occasion, I realize I read more than I thought. Alice Munro is currently in the lead for me. I used to love Amber Sparks (and still do.) Raymond Carver is excellent at the line level; Miranda July makes me think. Etc., etc.

When I first wrote this review in fall of 2025, I’d recently finished reading a fair number of Matthiessen titles, starting with The Tree Where Man Was Born (whose title I always bungle.) I’d also finished up The Snow Leopard and End of the Earth, and am perpetually wading through Shadow Country.

After finishing this last fall, I also read a biography on Peter Matthiessen, which was one of my top books of 2025, but I keep avoiding reviewing it because I could easily write 5,000 words on the subject. (I could probably write a thesis on it.)

On the River Styx bundles ten of his short stories, completed over the arc of his life. Each has a dark, unsettling structure that aligns sometimes with the Southern Gothic influence I examine for my own work. Bits reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark, or the harsh exposure of Flannery O’Connor.

My Reaction

While I’d say On the River Styx has a broadly unifying aesthetic—even more interesting to examine now that I’ve read the biography detailing the background behind each of these—I do appreciate how varied this collection is. The quality varies too, but not in a way adhered to linear time. The later ones are not inherently better.

For that reason, I have a hard time describing what Matthiessen’s voice is even like here. In nonfiction, I’d call it relatively neutral.

(Also, fascinatingly enough—a big theme of his biography is Matthiessen grappling with the disjointedness of his own life: an unwillingness to commit to a cohesive and singular self while paradoxically wanting full control over his image and projection. That confusion or sense of lostness may appear format-wise in how all over the place his stories and voice can be, unified instead by his byline and not by some singular quality.)

Fair warning that some stories in this are so horribly obviously written in the 50s. While Matthiessen is attempting in some ways to grapple with race, I found the attempt so clumsy as to feel racist itself. Nowadays, I’m likely rather skeptical or cynical about the desire to write “subversively” considering Matthiessen’s position in society, so I don’t much like that “Travelin’ Man” exists. He often defaults to writing about people of color as being animalistic, and the voice in those works is always very aggressive in a weird way. (If you look at other reviews, you’ll see plenty of fawning men saying his stories wouldn’t hold up to today’s “woke” standards; there is a type.)

I think I have plenty of nuanced thoughts on authors writing about subject matters or demographics that do not belong to them—so I’m not inherently against the artistic choice or intention—but you may just have to trust me that I’m not purity-testing Matthiessen here when I say this. Instead, I just think some of his racial depictions came off as pretty ugly. I’d like to believe the best intentions, but overall the effect just feels icky. In fairness, I do believe his depictions of race get slightly better throughout his career? That’s just my initial impression.

Overall Thoughts

I have complicated feelings on Matthiessen, which is why I’ve been putting off reviewing his biography, but some themes emerge in his works pretty regularly—which are consistently fascinating to unpack.

He loves landscape and escapism (as do I.) He resents his own fragmentation and his lack of a cohesive self—a sense of self-betrayal and crisis that I personally view as related to his own solipsism—so he despises when he has to confront the way others see him. Matthiessen never seems to like bringing himself along, and would prefer to shed his own skin whenever confronted. “The dread of home,” anyone? It all reverberates within his characters.

The bleak undercurrent isn’t for me, and I didn’t like how he attempted to address racial relations here, but I did appreciate his constant experimentation with POV, sentence structure, topics, etc. Whether or not it’s effective, even the author’s note mentions how his early collection of stories reflected a desire to try on other tones and personas. It’s a worthy goal, and roughly the point of writing fiction, so I didn’t mind that the attempt towards variation itself could be clunky all together.

“Most of these early stories revealed very little besides the ambition of the new writer to try on a variety of tones and voices—male and female, black and white, rich and poor, rural and urban—”

My favorite story in the bunch was about an argument over whether or not to shoot an old turtle—which did remind me a lot of the melancholy and repression of Alice Munro’s body of work, or a similar motif in Jodi Lynn Anderson’s Midnight at the Electric. The imagery and dynamics there are just haunting.

For fans of:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro; Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner; The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen; Benito Cereno by Herman Melville; True Nature by Lance Richardson; A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor.

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Book: Girls Our Age by Phoebe Thompson
Release Date: May 5, 2026
Publisher: Lake Union Press
Format: eBook / Audiobook
Source: Library

Three women navigate their late twenties together in a bittersweet novel about female friendship, identity, and growing up—from the hope and promise of college to the realities that lie beyond.

Lily, Ana, and Margot have been best friends ever since Hawthorne Res Life assigned them as roommates during their first year of college.

Ten years later and Lily is planning her wedding to the endlessly supportive and entirely symmetrical Jack. Ana is a fourth-grade teacher at the prestigious Horizon Academy, alma mater of her long-term boyfriend, who’s finally asked her to move in. Margot is about to land a life-changing promotion at ad agency McQueen O’Doul.

It all looks good from here.

But when the three friends converge on Maine for the wedding, the real challenges they’ve been able to keep from each other begin to surface. It’s finally time to open up about the very private struggles they’ve hidden for too long and the risks they’ve taken to protect themselves, and those they love, from the truth.

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Why I Picked It Up

I picked this one up unexpectedly. I'd seen the author's social media posts (she runs a marketing agency, and seems great at what she does) and I've liked her content before. This happened to be available under my "read in future" library tag on a night when I couldn't sleep, and the rest was history.

I really loved this book. The writing is on the minimal side, but really nailed a lot. Within a few pages, I felt very "seen," like it was really capturing the particular problems and triumphs of my stage of life and my circle's—the types of thoughts we actually have, versus what's depicted fictionally, if that makes sense. (I'm not sure how to phrase this, but it captured some mundane slice-of-life details that made it feel very real.)

The Characters

What I loved about Girls Our Age was that even throughout friendship conflicts between the characters, Thompson did a great job not painting one person solely in the wrong. There’s the lacking context and the flawed priorities at times, but you see a lot of missed connections as a reader vs. just landing on one person’s side.1

Fundamentally, there were a lot of feelings and contrasts and uncertainties that Thompson just absolutely nailed, especially in a time period in which peoples’ experiences can be so very uneven—even when you started from the same place, or realize that you were given a completely different set of tools from somebody else.

Ana, Lily, and Margot were compellingly drawn to the extent that you understood why someone was too drunk, another got too caught up in the little things, another was being too much of a pushover in a way that inconvenienced others. Each of the pain points felt very real, and you understood how they got there and also why it caused any tension. A lot of the scenarios (moving in with a partner creating doubts, transition resurfacing an eating disorder, making a job move and then regretting it, etc.) were true-to-life while still being interesting enough.

Ana’s living in San Francisco with the boyfriend she’s been dating for almost a decade, and moving in with him makes her realize that they’re not a great fit anymore; he earns a lot more and is condescending towards her work as a teacher, and often leaves a mess for her to clean up. She also doesn’t love her new job at the elite school he grew up going to, whereas when she complains to him about it, he’s much more likely to side with his social circle. Her mom’s also having dizzy spells, which is a worry in the back of her mind.

Prime example of a well-drawn feeling: on her week off for spring break, she ends up doing a lot of the household work because he’s grinding—even though it’s her only time off. The next day, she has to wait around for a package because he’s in a meeting, which wastes one of her precious days too; by then, it’s dinnertime, which she’s expected to make. And I loved that dynamic, because it’s so real. Phoebe Thompson can write about a small thing realistically compounding into a big feeling without the reading experience feeling boring, and that kind of frustration feels so true to life.

They practically never fought. Their frontal lobes were fully developed, and they were thinking about getting a dog.

Eventually Ana had learned to stop trying to explain. That the California kids and the New York kids were just in a different league. They knew the same people from before, which didn't make any sense—why would a kid from LA go to a summer camp all the way in Maine?—but it wasn't worth getting bent out of shape over, or even trying to understand.

Lily, meanwhile, is getting married to a wonderful partner, Jack. They’ve just moved to Boston so he can attend Harvard Law, and she didn’t realize until she got there that there’s not a great job translation for her from book publishing. Nothing sounds appealing, but she also doesn’t want to be stay-at-home before she’d planned to. Sure, she has a trust, but it’s more about having purpose within her day, and her people-pleasing throughout the wedding process is resurfacing the eating disorder and OCD that’s been dormant for a while. She probably needs to go into treatment, but she doesn’t know how to bring it up pre-wedding and it makes her feel like she’s failed at something. Lily’s narration, especially, had some big, striking feelings in it that were gorgeously and sensitively portrayed.

She cared so much then: about every single solitary detail...about her math tests, which she always did well on, but hyperventilated throughout nonetheless, especially if the teacher started them late—for some reason, she thought that starting after the first seven minutes of class would make her brain go totally blank. About which of the girls in her class thought she was relevant, a word whose absence had the power to ricochet through her, rendering her entire being worthless...

It was just too hard, Lily thought. To be getting older and more serious and to have nothing to show for it.

Margot, meanwhile, is on the verge of the promotion she's been working for in Chicago; she's channeled everything into work for years and it's finally about to pay off, but it's also making her snappy towards her friends and frustrated that her type-A organization abilities are being taken for granted as she's being helpful on wedding prep. The timing of the trip is just awful, and she's trying to handle her stress without radiating her stress, even though her friends will likely pick at her for not being in-the-moment with them.

It had been sometime between Margot's grandmother dying alone in a cordoned-off hospital and her discovery that $80,000 a year was actually not that much money that she'd stopped caring quite so much, which is to say, she still cared a lot.

She felt more tired than she'd ever felt before. It was a sinking, heavy, all-encompassing exhaustion, one she'd never felt before but knew instinctively wouldn't be resolved by sleep...she'd never felt so incapable in her life. How had she not realized how tired she was? Surely this weight had been knocking around in the cavity of her chest for some time, trying to alert her to its presence, ricocheting across the inside of her ribs.

Again, the writing was rather minimal, but it had a light cleverness and familiarity that made me appreciate everything it evoked. It was tender at the right times.2

It’s so spot on about experiences like unemployment and bachelorette parties and different levels of friendship with various roommates and perfectionism and the guilt over calling people at a good time. The friends offended each other at times for not registering that the way they’d behaved—or what they’d asked about or what they hadn’t—had upset the other person, and everyone was just trying their best but still messing up. One bails at the wrong time; another is constantly bitching about the same thing she needs to get over; another hasn’t been good enough at thanking people.

I'm thirty-two years old, and I don't own my own brain. I'm just a repository of Figma files.

Overall Thoughts

I loved Girls Our Age. It’s like—because it did a lot well, it made me realize how little I’d read the feelings and transitions she’d depicted, some of which were familiar to me.3 The interjections and shifts each character had between thoughts felt very true to the rhythm of my life in a way that tapped into a sort of social awareness I’ve been missing recently—the sense of being in the thick of things.

Girls Our Age deftly captures a lot of the impossibility of keeping a dozen priorities afloat at the same time, and even had a good sense of when to resurface lightly-trodden plot threads, so I found it all constantly engaging. (Each of the characters was a perfectionist in a different way, which is probably partly why I liked them so much. Everyone was lonely for their own reasons too, and that didn’t mean they weren’t being good enough or that they didn’t have the right friends.) The ending was sweet, which I liked, but may not be “literary” enough for some.

I also switched off between print and audio here, and really liked the audiobook narration too!

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More From Words Like Silver

If you enjoyed this review, you might also like:

Browse the full Words Like Silver archive on Substack here.

There is absolutely nothing I would love more than to be able to devote more time and energy to Words Like Silver, which has remained a one-person effort since age 13. If my work makes a difference to you, I’d love if you’d consider becoming a subscriber or upgrading your subscription below. You can also make a one-time donation on my website or purchase a book for my library. Anything makes such a massive difference, and I appreciate the support more than you can imagine.

Book: The Naturals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Release Date: 2013
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Format: eBook
Source: Library

Seventeen-year-old Cassie is a natural at reading people. Piecing together the tiniest details, she can tell you who you are and what you want. But, it’s not a skill that she’s ever taken seriously. That is, until the FBI come knocking: they’ve begun a classified program that uses exceptional teenagers to crack infamous cold cases, and they need Cassie.

What Cassie doesn’t realize is that there’s more at risk than a few unsolved homicides—especially when she’s sent to live with a group of teens whose gifts are as unusual as her own. Soon, it becomes clear that no one in the Naturals program is what they seem. And when a new killer strikes, danger looms close. Caught in a lethal game of cat and mouse with a killer, the Naturals are going to have to use all of their gifts just to survive.

Think The Mentalist meets Pretty Little Liars—Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s The Naturals is a gripping psychological thriller with killer appeal, a to-die-for romance, and the bones of a gritty and compelling new series.

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Why I Picked It Up

I’ve been a longtime fan of Jennifer Lynn Barnes, way back in her midlist days, and The Naturals draws from her extensive psychological knowledge in such an appealing way. I reference her work nearly constantly, as she’s a cognitive scientist who spent years researching and teaching about the psychology of fiction and fandom, often layering her theories into her work to make it more gripping to reluctant readers.

It works, which is why she’s experienced phenomenal commercial success with her most recent series The Inheritance Games, and The Naturals hit the NYT bestseller list 13+ years after its release. Unreal, and so deserved.

JLB’s books are punchy, angsty, funny, twisty—consumable but with a lot of cleverness and smarts, so you know everything on the page is deeply considered and whittled down to what’s effective.

I was in the mood for this type of witty thriller recently so devoured the series again. A few years back, this was also the book that got me to watch Criminal Minds (TV) for the first time, aligning with books I’ve loved like The Conditions of Will and A Study in Charlotte.

Characters

Each of JLB’s narrators are similarly sharp and capable and amusing. In this series vs. her others, each of the “found family” members of this ragtag group of teens has some skeletons in their closets that forced them to develop their skillsets—lie detection, reading emotions, skill with numbers and statistics, criminal profiling.

One aspect that makes JLB’s storytelling fantastic—beyond craft advice I could listen to forever, like playing with the gaps in a narrative or generating red herrings for yourself or her famous id list—is that her archetypes and the differences between them are always neat and clean even when the emotions surrounding them are messy. Characters stay in their lanes which makes the contrast and tension sharp, but not at the cost of dimensionality. They still feel fully-fledged.

By that, I mean each character handles situations differently because of their preexisting lens, and the clarity in their characterization makes them easy to identify and keep track of. The reading experience ends up being relatively effortless because it’s obvious how much of their behavior is mapped to genuine internal logic. That backend work makes the emotional beats land harder.

Plot & Pacing

JLB’s books are intelligent because she is, so they’re also just fun. She’s excellent at building out an addictive mystery. The scenes flow together seamlessly but still feel punctuated and snappy. The overall effect is polished and punchy.

When following a case in The Naturals series, the plot is always harrowing. She’s not afraid to get appropriately grim and violent in the details (for teenagers), but she can also be goofy, because they’re teenagers. The psychological explanations in parallel are clear, interesting, and well-layered.

In each book, I’ve never guessed the culprit. And the angst is fabulous.

Overall Thoughts

I really love this series, and how easy it is to sink into. So many of her writing rules unfold in my head when reading because she is simply that good, and I’m so happy that her books are really taking off the way they deserve. In later installments of the series, some of the plot can start to feel a bit convoluted for my personal taste in scale—so I reread the first three books and skipped the fourth—but The Naturals is fun and fascinating and worth devouring.

For fans of:

The Gallagher Girls series by Ally Carter; A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro; The Conditions of Will by Jessa Hastings; Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson; A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson; Thieves' Gambit by Kayvion Lewis.

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More From Words Like Silver

If you enjoyed this review, you might also like:

Browse the full Words Like Silver archive on Substack here.

There is absolutely nothing I would love more than to be able to devote more time and energy to Words Like Silver, which has remained a one-person effort since age 13. If my work makes a difference to you, I’d love if you’d consider becoming a subscriber or upgrading your subscription below. You can also make a one-time donation on my website or purchase a book for my library. Anything makes such a massive difference, and I appreciate the support more than you can imagine.

Book: Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
Release Date: January 2007
Publisher: Crown
Format: eBook
Source: Library

Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town.

Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story—and survive this homecoming.

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Why I Picked It Up

I picked this one up for a few reasons, each intersecting this past week:

• There’s a song I love in my book revision playlist, “plus tôt”, that I discovered when walking in on someone playing the finale episode of the HBO adaptation of Sharp Objects, and it came on yesterday,

• I’ve been reading a few Southern Gothics—In Cold Blood, When the Bones Sing, etc.—that take place in Missouri or are otherwise Midwestern-adjacent,

• I’ve read a couple more books in this vein: a grizzled, distant journalist or cop undergoing an investigation that surfaces family mystery, so I’m calibrated for that sort of cynical tone at the moment.

When I heard the song again, I was reminded I’d never actually gotten around to the book—and I wanted something punchy and immersive and twisty, so a highly-hyped mystery would be up my alley.

About the Book

Sharp Objects is Gillian Flynn’s debut, although most know her for the shattering success of Gone Girl. Over the last year, I’ve also heard a good number of people reference this book as being Southern Gothic, hence my own interest in it.1

The book starts out with Camille admitting she’s not a great reporter, but her (kind) boss Curry keeps her around because he knows she’s had a hard time. Windy Gap, her hometown, isn’t good for her, but he promises to yank her out if it gets to her; the opportunity to scoop a buzzy story, and follow the blueprint of another local paper that won a Pulitzer for similar reporting, is too tempting for the paper.

When Camille arrives, she starts falling into old habits as she scopes out the mystery of Natalie, the latest girl to go missing. Her mom is emotionally distant but also strangely suffocating; her half-sister is a bully. Partway through the book, we learn why the family’s shaped the way it is, from the bloody multi-million dollar pig farm that keeps it rolling in fortune to the reason why Camille’s been a cutter her entire life.

While the reveals are slow and steady, unfurling over discoveries—so I don’t want to unpack too much family history, as a lot of the pleasure is in clicking together the slow pieces—they are engaging. The pacing is gradual but compelling, and Camille’s despair reminded me a lot of dark protagonists like Andi from Revolution or even Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke: bitter and self-destructive, in too deep to be able to restart.

Admittedly, I knew the ending before going in, so that colors my ability to determine whether the mystery itself was predictable. I was never surprised by how the pieces came together, and stand behind my guess that I would have figured out the culprit even without it being spoiled for me; however, the intrigue of Sharp Objects is more about Camille and the town’s fabric than—solely—the murders. You want to know why Camille is so messed up and how she’s going to yank herself out of it.

She’s trying, but at the same time—she’s padding her stories, she’s drinking (constantly) so you quickly learn she’s an alcoholic, and her high school stories have a dismissive, shocking bent that show she’s been punishing herself for a long time.

At the end, I found some pieces of the mystery—most specifically related to the murders—to require a good bit of suspension of disbelief to force the thematic points of the narrative.2 There’s a dash of deus ex machina but it’s good enough through then not to matter.

Still, I enjoyed the story and found the way it narrowed in over time to be addictive. I didn’t want to put it down, and inhaled most of it in one night—which is usually what I’m looking for in a mystery. I see how its blunt, edgy tone makes it catnip for adaptation and widespread appeal, and Gillian Flynn is simply great at this kind of plot. Sharp Objects sets the tone for her later works well.

Voice & Tone

On that note, Sharp Objects feels dark. It does an excellent job fleshing out (in my opinion) the why behind Camille’s cutting—alluring, horrifying, etc. (I maybe wouldn’t read if you struggle with self-harm.) The moments in which the urge pops up—and what her skin buzzes in response to, for example—are mapped in a way that seems psychologically sound and not gimmicky.

On a line level, I personally loved how the structure of how the cutting was set up (having carved specific words into her skin) could flare depending on what she was dealing with; she’d remember a specific word on her hip that tied in with the given moment, which struck me as an elegant way to paint a picture of her given emotional situation at any point.

Camille mostly keeps to herself, but her thoughts have some real darkness in them; she’s quick to tip over into lines and moments of self-hatred and confusion, exacerbated by her complicated relationship with her hometown and mother.

I always pay attention to the types of descriptions an author uses because the crutch words and details can illustrate tone so precisely. For Flynn, she might describe feeble gas station light, a seedy motel, a kid wiping his nose—ugly-ish details that portray the ragged feeling of the narrative itself. There are some great one liners in there too.

“Curry’s office is bland and institutional, like the rest of the building. You could debate journalism or get a Pap smear. No one cared.”

“An air freshener plugged into a nearby outlet hissed out a plastic smell meant to remind me of country breezes.”

“Every tragedy that happens in the world happens to my mother, and this more than anything turns my stomach.”

On the Southern Gothic side, the houses lack AC, even when wealthy; there's watery iced tea, and plenty of bourbon. Lukewarm baths? Pay phones, "rocky" coughs, sweating through her long sleeves.

“She was like a girl's very best doll, the kind you don't play with. She was wearing a long, pink cotton dress with little white slippers. She was twirling her amaretto sour without spilling a drop.”

Tonally, the book also liked to end chapters on disturbing one-line images that reminded me of edgy literary short stories, to various effect.3

There’s a sense of lost childhood running through the book for various reasons, some of which align to the Southern Gothic genre too, but if anything, Sharp Objects fits with this girlhood/rage/sexual/violence/consumption thread that ran parallel to some 2023-ish properties—like Yellowjackets (TV), Kill Creatures, The Lamb. Maybe even a little bit of Stephen King’s Carrie? It’s not particularly my style, but I can identify and appreciate the flavor and what it does, even when finding certain lines too heavy-handed like:

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”

Flynn was roughly fifteen years ahead of her time in that thread.

Towards the end, I loved how elegantly Flynn was able to tie the characterization to the childhood trauma, however; I thought she did a phenomenal job explaining why or how someone developed a certain way in response to specific treatment. There are also plenty of lines that display worldview and evolution quickly and efficiently without trying too hard, like at one point when Camille calls her mother’s grief a hobby. That’s my favorite kind of line sometimes because—does it say more about Camille or her mother?

There’s one line at the end I absolutely loved, but it’s too much of a spoiler for me to quote; it just perfectly describes the entire book in nine words, distilling it. I feel similarly about that line as I do about the ending of Emily Fridlund’s History of Wolves, which is also a very similar book. It built to a point.

My favorite part of the book—beyond the atmosphere skillfully narrowing in on Camille’s headspace, however bleak it could be—was her relationship with her boss, Curry. Camille grappled with how much of her instinct and self-wiring was for the right reasons—secretly manipulative, or kind? being an example4—and Curry was unconditionally caring in the way that she needed. Those moments of warmth likely balanced out the book in a way that it needed; if not for those glimmers of hope, Sharp Objects could have felt far too bitter.

Overall Thoughts

I really enjoyed the unfurling mystery of Sharp Objects and how smoothly it layered in toxic family dynamics. The plot itself is intriguing when you’re in the mood for a small-town murder investigation, and more of a backdrop for the sisters and mother silently imploding. Tracing back from the outcome to each detail feels obvious and clear, which to me was a sign of great characterization, even if some plot was shoehorned for convenience. The book is plenty elegant, and well-packaged.

And, as expected, I did love the precision of this particular flavor of Southern Gothic, even though my usual is more romantic. Worth the read for me. I may have to watch the show at some point.

For fans of:

Long Bright River by Liz Moore; Mare of Easttown (TV); Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly; Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow; Bleed Like Me by Christa Desir; History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund; Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke.

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More From Words Like Silver

If you enjoyed this review, you might also like:

Browse the full Words Like Silver archive on Substack here.

There is absolutely nothing I would love more than to be able to devote more time and energy to Words Like Silver, which has remained a one-person effort since age 13. If my work makes a difference to you, I’d love if you’d consider becoming a subscriber or upgrading your subscription below. You can also make a one-time donation on my website or purchase a book for my library. Anything makes such a massive difference, and I appreciate the support more than you can imagine.