Reviews and Comments

Aimee Crocker is an heiress who lived by her own rules between the 19th and 20th centuries. The Thirteenth Husband recounts her life, marked by her major relationships.

This was an intriguing read, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting acquainted with the fictionalized version of the real-life Aimee Crocker. Hers was a life with the sort of twists, turns, travels, and love affairs that only money can buy. If you're unaware of Crocker's life story, the plot of The Thirteenth Husband offers surprises, and the use of language is serviceable: no lofty literary turns here, but that helps to enhance Crocker's voice and eliminate fluff that could take away from the story.

If you love a biography but wish it were more infused with the fantastical, this book is for you. It doesn't skimp on mystery and the mystical in the midst of its realism. And the framing device that anchors the story is wonderful.

Welcome to Alton Road, an exclusive upper-class cul-de-sac filled with intrigue, secrets, and a troubled cast of characters. Pegged as a thriller, the story takes on the dual perspectives of Alex, a middle-aged legal meditator, wife, and mother struggling with a growing drinking problem, and Lettie, her teenage daughter struggling to find her footing through her final year of high school.

On reading The Block Party, I had a moment during which I suspected that the author was pulling a clever trick on the reader. Bouncing between third-person perspective chapters focused on Alex and first-person perspective chapters from Lettie's point of view, the entire book reads as though it's written by a teenage girl. I figured that the older Alex's chapters seemed so either to convey her world through the eyes of her daughter or to illustrate that the mother's mentality is as immature as her daughter's mindset.

But as the plot trod on and various secrets revealed, the pacing went a little wonky and I realized that cleverness was not the name of the game here. And once I realized that the story fell apart for me. What's left is a banal tale of wrongdoings, paranoia, and secrets in suburbia with a payoff that's undermined by the placement of the end at the beginning of the book.

Sunshine Nails revolves around a Vietnamese family from Toronto, their community, and their nail salon. The Trans, headed by Phil and Debbie, realized their dream of running a successful nail salon twenty years ago. But as their children, Jessica and Dustin, come of age, things change. With the rising rents brought on by gentrification, the family must make tough choices and examine the state of their lives in order to survive and thrive.

I found Sunshine Nails to be a very interesting read. The prose as well as the marketing makes it seem like a beach read, and in terms of vocabulary and literary merits, it is an easy read. But the characters and the themes are quite the opposite. The characters are complex people filled with contradictions and complicated histories. The themes of the way a family changes as its members age, of the knock-on effects of gentrification, and the ability of people to change at any time of life precipitate in the reader introspection and new realizations.

I'd recommend this book to anyone looking for some light reading that doesn't necessarily let you off the hook in terms of challenging one's view of the world.

"A History of Burning" is a sweeping family drama that takes place between the 1890s and 1990s. It is a fascinating, finely rendered tale of Indians who migrate from their country to Africa, then England and Canada.

The story begins with the family's origins in Africa, when in 1898 a young Pirbhai is tricked into boarding a boat to Kenya to help build the railway from the sea to Victoria Lake. From there, we follow his life and the life of his descendants as they build relationships, flourish, flounder, bend with changes, and see themselves through it all by clinging to each other.

More than the history of one family, the novel is a history of British colonialism in the 20th century and the real impacts of that regime on families and communities. I enjoyed spending time with Pirbhai, his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and anticipated returning to the book each time I was force to take a break for work or sleep. The only criticism I would offer was that, as opposed to the time spend reading about the family as they lived in Uganda, the later time in England and Canada (especially where concerned the great-grandson) felt a little rushed and denied the reader the final emotional beat that would have felt so satisfying (however saccharine).