Lemonreads: The Wife Upstairs

As a fan of all things Brontë (and I mean by ALL the Brontës), I was very excited, when looking for my next read, to come across the recently published The Wife Upstairs, which was described as a modern day retelling of Jane Eyre, set in Birmingham, Alabama.  I have never hit “Buy” so fast in the Kindle Store.   I thought that the gothic elements of Jane Eyre would lend themselves so well to a modern day thriller.

And, they might, but this isn’t that book.  Sure, this is a thriller. There is murder and mystery and intrigue a-plenty.  And yes, many names and some plot lines from Jane Eyre are used in The Wife Upstairs, but it should not be described as a re-telling.  

The Jane of The Wife Upstairs is a foster child who aged out of the system, and has suffered from the loneliness and trauma of an insecure childhood, like the original Jane, but the resemblance stops there.  This new Jane steals.  She deliberately lies.  She manipulates.  She is eager to climb the social ladder and take advantage of all of the material spoils of the well-to-do suburban society where she works as a dog-walker (the modern day equivalent of a governess, natch), at whatever cost.   The integrity, the bluntness and steadfastness of character that is really the hallmark of Jane Eyre herself is missing here completely. 

I found some of the homages to Jane Eyre clever (the subdivision in which the book takes place is called “Thornfield Estates,” for example), but shuddered every time the new Mr. Rochester was referred to as “Eddie,” and didn’t find the concept of his ward, Adele, being portrayed in this book as a DOG that needs walking to be anything but cringeworthy.

In her acknowledgements, Rachel Hawkins thanks readers who, like her, believed the original Jane “deserved better” than Mr. Rochester, implying that in her novel, she’s given that to her.  I completely disagree.  Read this book if you like easily digestible thrillers, but don’t read it because you are hoping for a clever interpretation of Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece. 

Lemonreads: Conversations With Friends

I enjoyed but didn’t love Normal People, Sally Rooney’s most celebrated novel, which was recently a BBC miniseries.  I found the main characters of Normal People, Connell and Marianne, both fairly unlikeable and frustrating.  I really enjoyed this book, however, which was Rooney’s debut novel, published in 2017.

Frances, the narrator, is a brilliant, depressed millennial cut from the same cloth as Connell and Marianne, but she possesses a level of self awareness that they don’t seem to have - or maybe they do, but Frances wants to move past what she currently is and grow, while Connell and Marianne seemed, to me, to be resigned to some fate.

I liked Rooney’s exploration of the love “square” between Frances, her best friend and ex Bobbi, and the older married couple, Nick and Melissa.  I found the messy but passionate understanding they all eventually reach to be hopeful and a more realistic, less idealized depiction of polyamory, and love in general: it’s hard, and there are no rules.   I would definitely recommend this book.  

Lemonreads: Hidden Valley Road

First, imagine having 12 children.

Then, imagine 10 of them are boys.

Then, imagine 6 of those 10 boys suffer from severe schizophrenia. 

This happened to Don and Mimi Galvin, raising their family in Colorado in the 60s, 70s and 80s.  One of their sons commits a horrific violent crime, one sexually abuses his younger siblings for years, and all of the boys demonstrate a terrifying level of physical aggression towards their family.  All of the boys spend their entire lives in and out of mental institutions.

Reading this book, it’s hard to believe it’s true.  The story is only made bearable by understanding how the Galvin family’s suffering’s contribute to science’s understanding of schizophrenia, how it is transmitted genetically, and how it can be treated and, someday, prevented.  Sadly, I think it will be too late to make any of the Galvin family members’ lives easier.  

TW for this book: domestic violence, sexual abuse, mental illness.

Lemonreads: A Delhi Obsession

I have never been anywhere so DIFFERENT from my own life as Delhi.  I find it hard to articulate how out of place and foreign I felt when I visited in November 2019.  With some distance, I now feel very nostalgic for that visit and want to someday dive back into the delightful, terrible, awesome bedlam of Delhi.  In this 2019 book, M.G. Vassanji perfectly describes how the “crowded, jostling, cluttered and infinitely noisy” Delhi overwhelms with its millennia of history, labyrinthine neighbourhoods and masses of people.  Vassanji shows us the city through the eyes of a Muslim Indo-Canadian writer, who desires to belong but can never shake off his foreignness.

I was very interested in Vassanji’s exploration of the Hindu/Muslim schism that I had no idea was still so prevalent in India until I visited.  In my experience, it varies by intensity, from a benign observation of difference to a justification for violence and oppression, depending on where you are and what is happening.  Just in the month I was there, our trip was re-routed at one point to avoid Muslim riots, and the Hindu government shut down the internet for several days during our trip to try to dispel unrest after an Indian court awarded ownership of a site sacred to both Hindus and Muslims to the Hindu community, after years of legal challenges - both of these events was shrugged off my our guides as normal.  

I am not sure India can ever be (or ever wants to be) a completely secular society where these cultural and religious identifiers don’t matter, and this is the central conflict of the book, both in terms of the plot, the internal struggles the protagonist Munir has to understand who he is and where he belongs, and between Munir and his lover, Mohini.  Beautifully written, heartbreaking and though-provoking.  I loved this book.

Lemonreads: Story House

I adored Timothy Taylor’s first novel, Stanley Park, published in 2003.  My copy is now coffee stained and dog eared after years of re-reading.  I’m not sure why I never got around to reading Taylor’s 2006 follow up, Story House, until now.  Like Stanley Park, Story House is set in Vancouver and I always get a kick out of reading books set in places I am familiar with - it helps to bring the story to life for me.  Much of this book takes place around a dilapidated house in the Downtown Eastside (my old neighbourhood), a structure that may be a relic of a world-famous architect, Packer Gordon.

Taylor does a deep, DEEP dive here into the world of architecture.  The majority of the characters are architects or architecture enthusiasts, and there are many very, very detailed descriptions of settings in this novel as seen through the eyes of these architecture-fluent characters.  It’s tough as a person without that architectural knowledge to envision what Taylor is describing as he waxes poetic about beams, light, angles and lines.  I almost wish architectural drawings of the places described had been included in the book to help ground layman readers such as myself.

What kept me interested in this book was not the plot, around the revival of the building known as Story House, but the web of love, hurt and lies that tie together Graham Gordon, an architect, his half-brother Elliot, their wives, and their dead architect father.  In both Stanley Park and in Story House, Taylor is a master at creating characters so layered, with such deep and intricate histories, that you are sure they are real and that he is writing biography.  He is also skilful at depicting the complicated nature of families and relationships - this is what makes his writing stand apart for me.

That being said, I was somewhat disappointed in this novel, perhaps because I couldn’t fully immerse myself in the world of architecture in which the story is set.  I also found the prose to be so dense, so determinedly poetic, that I often had to re-read sections.  I found the end dissatisfying and wasn’t sure that it was the logical conclusion to the story.  I look forward to reading more from Timothy Taylor, but this book doesn’t achieve “instant classic” status for me as his first novel did.

Lemonreads: We Wish You Luck

First book of 2021! Written in a plural first-person narrative (“we”), this book recounts a series of traumatic events between students and faculty at a low-residency writing MFA workshop in Vermont. The author, also a literary editor, is a graduate of a real-life program, the Bennington Writing Seminars, that no doubt provided the inspiration for this fictional college. The novel takes a very long time to identify who this “we” narrator is, and I spent much of the book wondering about this point, which was an interesting experience - you don’t generally spend an ENTIRE novel wondering whose lens is framing the story, and who is necessarily missing from the narrative because they are the one(s) telling it. The book repeatedly foreshadows some major event (lines like “we didn’t know then that...” or “of course now looking back we understand that...” I am paraphrasing but you get the gist), and the payoff of that major event that looms so large for the narrator(s) didn’t live up to that foreshadowing, in my opinion. That being said, the book is still a very good read, introducing fascinating three dimensional characters, exploring the dynamics of students and teachers in a small creative program, experimenting with collective storytelling and memory, and questioning the nature of art, writing and for whom we write. I have found myself thinking about it days after I finished reading, which is the sign of a food book. Published by @penguinrandomhouse, and I believe the paperback is being released in the next few weeks.