The Lion Women of Tehran

Review: 3.5 stars

This was my pick for our university girls' book club. With everything happening between Iran and the United States, I wanted to understand, even a little, what it might have felt like to live as a woman in Iran, across some of the most pivotal decades in the country's history. Kamali tells that story through a friendship, which turns out to be exactly the right vessel for it.

'The Lion Women of Tehran' follows Ellie and Homa from childhood in 1950s Tehran through three tumultuous decades. Ellie, lonely after her father's death and newly improverished, finds Homa on the first day of school. Together they dream of becoming "lion women", strong and fearless in the face of whatever comes. Class pulls them apart when Ellie's family reclaims its former privilege, politics pulls them back together, and one devastating betrayal rearranges both of their lives.

Kamali's writing extracts exactly the feelings she intends. You feel your own fingers curl with embarrassment when Homa arrives at Ellie's posh new high school, the smell of the downtown markets still on her, resurrecting Ellie's past of poverty. You experience the visceral shock when Ellie discovers the means through which her mother secures their family's return to their former, wealthier neighborhood.

It reminded me, inevitably, of Ferrante's 'My Brilliant Friend,' one of my favorite books. The architecture is similar - a formative friendship between two girls who take sharply different paths, each watching the other live the life she did not choose. Kamali is honest about how complex that bond is, the undercurrent of competition, the way you can love someone and yet still harbour pangs of jealousy. Despite the trials they endure, Homa and Ellie's friendship is unified always by the intimate bonds forged from being sisters by choice, not blood. Whatever else passes between them, that foundation holds.

The character I admired most was Homa, and her singular tenacity and sense of purpose in fighting for women's rights. Underneath it all, a question I kept turning over: how much do you owe your country? There is a tragedy of the commons in watching others risk their lives for freedoms you would enjoy if they won, knowing you would be no worse off if they lost, since you were never complicit.

The trappings of Ellie's life, the wealth, the beauty, the well-matched husband, make for much easier reading. Part of you enjoys the fairy tale and does not want it blemished by real life. But it is Homa's imperfect, fire-forged life that draws you in. A dark past, an unspeakable period of tragedy, things Ellie can only look upon with pity. Yet through it all, Homa refuses to succumb to victimhood.

By the end, the lionesses of the title step fully forward, each having asserted herself in very different ways. Homa most directly, in her covert efforts against the traditionalist regime, until she arrives at the bleakest realization of the book - no matter which men are in charge, they need someone to subjugate, and that class is invariably, women.

I missed the actual book club discussion, but the verdict that reached me afterward was warm. Everyone liked it and considered it an easy read but an equally touching one. It is a well-written, absorbing story with enough literary grit to make it a worthwhile, though not fully memorable, read. I know very little about Iran, and this book was a small window into what is fought for there, what is won and what is lost.

Whistler

Review: 3.5 stars

Earlier this year I joined a second book club. One of my ex-co-workers gathered a group of stellar, smart women, and every two months we come together to talk through some of our most anticipated reads. This round’s selection was Ann Patchett’s ‘Whistler’, and I finished it well ahead of our November discussion.

I liked this one more than Pachett’s ‘The Dutch House’, though I will say upfront that it is not a book with a propulsive plot line. It begins when our narrator, Daphne Fuller, is reunited with her estranged stepfather, Eddie Triplett, at the Met in New York. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn about Daphne’s car accident - the one that came just before Eddie abruptly vanishes from her life. The novel draws you into the delicate relationship between stepfather and stepdaughter, weaving throughout the small pops of joy that can truly only come when conversing with someone who deeply understands you.

Daphne belongs to three fractured families at once, anchored by her mother, an effervescent parent. The novel explores Daphne’s varied relationships with her now-deceased biological father Buddy, her adoring stepfather Eddie, and her mother’s third husband, Lucas Ekker. In the present, she and her husband, Jonathan, are moving through their fifties and sixties, contemplating purpose, time and grief.

The book sits inside big questions without ever resolving them. What comes next. Whether there is an in between as you near death. What it means to be remembered. Near the end there is a beautiful scene of circularity at the Met that left me wondering about the chapters I had just traversed, whether they were the beginning or the end. At various points, the novel challenges whether life is best remembered through the things we leave behind. Orphaned belongings reveal morsels of a life lived, a memory resurrected. When someone exits a life unexpectedly, each object is both full of sentimental weight and none at all, a burden of unresolved feelings and unhad conversations.

For some readers, this novel may feel slow moving, overly contemplative, very much an inner voice expressed through vignettes of a life. It is the story of someone with purpose and a dream not yet fulfilled, working to make sense of her own life in the context of others. It is a story of relationships, those that are superficial, those that are honest, and those that are never how you want them to be, and in the end that is okay too.

After closing the final pages, I came to realize that whoever you come across in life will never know your full story. Daphne is the only one who knew what happened before, during, and after the car accident. But she will never know the thoughts that raced through Eddie’s mind nor the pain he suffered in those moments. Each character carried a part of life kept hidden until exposed, and in the exposure you come to appreciate the life they have lived, the decisions they have made, and who they are in relation to you. Which raises the real question: once you know these other parts of someone, does it change who they are?

Similar to The Dutch House, this is a deep examination of a family portrait, everything visible at the surface and the icebergs beneath. A good read, but not great. I look forward to hearing what the other ladies make of it.

Trust Exercise

Review: 4.5 stars

This one was recommended by my sister, who I trust with book recommendations wholeheartedly.

Trust Exercise follows Sarah and David, two impressionable drama students at an elite performing arts high school. They are pushed to their full potential by Mr. Kingsley, a teacher who humiliates his students in order to hone their acting into a sharp weapon. The first part of the book is extremely readable - the romantic tension between Sarah and David, the mystique of Kingsley and his inappropriate closeness to his students. It's a magnetic story.

But what makes this book truly amazing is the reframe in the second part, when you find out that Sarah has written a novel about her own past life, and in doing so has leveraged Karen's lived experience, rounding off its edges, and turning it into a bestselling novel. Karen's real life tragedy is expunged from Sarah's narrative, and she is relegated to a supporting character in Sarah's novel, but the source material is Karen's onw life. Suddenly the book isn't about what you thought it was about at all.

What's fascinating is how many angles of trust Choi explores. Most literally through the trust exercises themselves, which wring such extreme truths out of these kids that embarrassment becomes a bonding agent, tying the students to Kingsley with something close to hostage-level loyalty. Then the deeper, thornier question: who can be trusted with your story? What happens to the truth of what you lived when someone else remembers it differently, or appropriates it outright and reshapes it?

And then the third part arrives, with its unknown woman, and casts the first two parts into chaotic relief. Choi leaves it unresolved, and you begin to question everything. Who really owns this story? Are Sarah and Karen actually two sides of the same person? Can you even trust your own memory, or do traumatic experiences force you to compartmentalize, splitting your lived experience as a coping mechanism, a way to rebuild trust in yourself?

At face value this is an easy, propulsive, compelling novel. But if you choose to follow the rabbit hole, it becomes extremely cerebral. That duality is what makes it brilliant: it forces you to question every facet of trust, starting with the trust you placed in the narrator on page one.

Five Little Indians

Review: 4 stars

This was Tanya's pick for my university girls' book club, which we read last fall, and the timing finally feels right to write about it: September 30 is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada, and this is the book I would press into every Canadian's hands this week.

It was an extremely difficult read. I was born and raised in Vancouver, and growing up I spent a lot of time in Chinatown, trailing my parents as they picked up fresh vegetables and meat for the restaurant they ran. We always passed through the Downtown Eastside to get there. My pediatrician was at 475 Main Street, which on a recent visit home, I found lined with tents and makeshift shelters. It has always been a hard area to look at directly. But reading the stories of Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie, and Maisie, five residential school survivors trying to stay alive in that same neighborhood, changed the way I pass through it - with less prejudice and caution, and more curiosity. The book asked me to see individuals, not masses.

The book reminded me of A Little Life, one of my favorite novels, in the way Michelle Good is unrelenting about lived experience in all its harshness. No softening, no looking away: the bleakness, the compounding trauma, the way a person's history quietly sets the ceiling on what they believe they're allowed to be. Maisie's story was the hardest to sit with, the brutality of it, how completely her sense of self and reality had been warped by the schools. All five of them grew so accustomed to loss, to people leaving without warning, to nobody being on their side, that doing something as ordinary as living a normal life required them to be almost extraordinary.

It also left me humbled by how little I knew, and honest about something uncomfortable: I don't know how to teach my own children about this yet. The brutality makes it hard. You want them to understand how much they have compared to the children who were taken, and the comparison is so jarring it barely feels shareable. That's not a reason to look away, but it is a real tension I sat with.

My favorite arc was Clara's: surviving, finding her roots, returning to her community without apology to serve it and lift it up, and finally arriving at her own quiet life. It sounds like such a simple list of wants. Community, support, love, living into your forties and fifties. But nothing on that list can be taken for granted in a community with this heritage of abuse, this history of having identity stripped away. Clara earning the ordinary felt like the most radical ending in the book.

I highly recommend it to Canadians, especially right now. And take it slowly. Don't rush through it. Sit with what it means to be Canadian, a country built on the shoulders of this past.

Yesteryear

Review: 3 stars

I chose Yesteryear the way you choose a paperback at an airport: I wanted something fast-paced and easy, a proper summer read. I carried it with me to Hangzhou, China on a family vacation and finished it in two days, reading in the stolen hours before my kids woke up and in the dead of night. On those terms, it delivered.

As a full-time working mom, I found the premise uncomfortably on point. There is a version of the domestic fantasy that tugs at you more than you'd like to admit…what it would be like to fully dedicate yourself to the home, to care for your kids to your utmost capability, to feel confident about every meal you're feeding your family, to have a beautifully decorated home. It's always been slightly out of reach for me, because there are never enough hours in the week. So the tradwife phenomenon has always fascinated me. I've always admired stay-at-home moms, because the real version of that life, where nothing ever goes according to plan, is so much harder than the fantasy.

Natalie Heller Mills, the narrator and protagonist, is a powerful allegory for what happens when you start cosplaying the thing you aspire to be. In performing it, you lose pieces of yourself. The stress of maintaining a constant face, to the world, to your family, to yourself, is enormous. I read her eventual break as the inevitable result: a woman trapped in her own mental prison, completely untethered from reality. The pioneer life, when it finally arrives stripped of the Instagram filter, is fully miserable. That felt like the book's sharpest karma: to live the "authentic" life she was selling, which in reality was built on terrible bread, brutal manual labor and harsh conditions. A version of domesticity with nothing left to photograph.

The book pulled me in easily, and I admired the author's nerve in making Natalie essentially unredeemable: no softening, no rescue. There are genuine surprises tucked in, including the bleak punchline that in the end, it's just Natalie and her husband, Caleb, who have one another, despite everything they lack for each other. Still, for all its momentum, I didn't love it. It's a good light thriller, and a solid recommendation for anyone looking for a fast read. However, it was not the most literary or the most memorable one.

Land of Milk and Honey

Review: 4 stars

My older sister is a voracious reader; I think our “to be read” stacks could rival each other in height. I always love unwrapping her birthday gifts to me, which are inevitably thoughtful reads. ‘Land of Milk and Honey’ was one she gave me a few years ago, and I’m glad I finally got to it.

Pre-pandemic, my husband and I were restaurant aficionados. At times, we (annoyingly) lamented that we were “done” with Michelin restaurants, no longer shocked by avant-garde cuisine. We had become the characters in Netflix’s ‘The Menu’ - pretentious, exacting, and inured by foams and gels. C. Pam Zhang wrote this novel during the pandemic, when everyday pleasures and shared experiences felt fragile. By setting the story in a near-future world of scarcity, Zhang explores how survival, ethics, and pleasure collide - and how what we take for granted, like a beautiful meal, can expose what’s broken in the world.

The narrator is a poor, French-trained chef recruited by a reclusive billionaire and his daughter, Aida, to work at a mountaintop bio-sanctuary in Italy. Below them, the world has been choked by smog and ash; crops and biodiversity are gone, and most people survive on mung-protein flour. On the mountain, she prepares lavish meals from exotic and extinct ingredients - golden chimpanzees, mammoth, quail, truffles, lamb’s ears. “If the land of milk and honey produced no further milk, this meal proclaimed, then we would sup of the last like kings and queens.” These dinners are not just indulgence; they are fundraising performances for an elite list of donors hoping to buy their way into a future agricultural reserve.

She becomes intoxicated by this world of rare ingredients and excess, even cosplaying as Aida’s deceased mother to preside over fundraising dinners, lending them a spiritual gravity. She and Aida fall into a sensual, consuming relationship, which deepens her ethical unease about living in luxury while the rest of the world starves. At the center of the novel is the belief that wealth and ingenuity can always delay catastrophe; that money can keep pushing collapse one meal further away.

When Aida asks why the narrator trained in French cuisine, her answer is devastating in its honesty: “I refused to be stuck...in the smallness of my mother’s life. In a fixed notion of cooking, my abilities, my worth as ascribed to my Chineseness my Asianness my smallness my womanness my perpetual foreignness - myself. French cuisine is respected everywhere. To earn the chance to cook real food, I needed that respect.” That word - real - hangs over the novel like a dare. It evokes The Matrix question: would you rather live in a beautiful illusion or the raw grit of reality? How many honeyed figs or luscious gougères is truth worth?

Zhang’s writing is deeply immersive; you feel the textures of fat, salt, sugar, ash, and rot. Land of Milk and Honey is unsettling, indulgent, and quietly devastating. It leaves you with a lingering discomfort about what we consume, what we ignore, and what we’re willing to trade for our morality.

The Coin

Rating: 4.5 stars

As I was flying out of SFO over winter break, I stopped by Compass Books, a well-curated Barnes & Noble independent offshoot. While my kids roamed around, I made my way through the fiction section and came across The Coin. In one simple word, it was fabulous.

The Coin follows a young Palestinian woman living in New York, whose life begins to unravel as her relationship to money, cleanliness, beauty, and power turns increasingly obsessive. Through her work as a teacher and her entanglements with wealth and luxury, the novel examines how identity fractures when control becomes a substitute for meaning.

The novel feels deliberately deranged—a controlled descent into obsession. Zaher fixates on filth and cleanliness and on the unbearable discomfort of believing there is a coin lodged inside her body, resisting logic or medical resolution. The narrator’s CVS Retreat ritual of scrubbing her body for several hours with multiple drugstore detergents, is her attempt at treatment. Her descriptions of curdled skin, soap, dirt, and residue after a bath are visceral - the refuse is her. Why do we become disgusted by what has molted from our bodies, when moments earlier it was an invisible layer inseparable from the self? “I was flushed, clean. I had shed what needed to be shed. At the end of the day it was just garbage. But I had oiled and spiced it up like it was a celebratory leg of lamb.”Paradoxically, as her cleaning compulsions intensify, she begins to intentionally soil both her physical appearance and her reputation.

The coin itself becomes the quiet center of the novel: a lodged object that refuses to be expelled. It represents what cannot be scrubbed away—trauma, class anxiety, displacement, the uneasy inheritance of money and power. Her fixation on cleanliness feels less about hygiene than about control, the hope that if every contaminant is eliminated, something unbearable inside her might finally disappear. The novel insists otherwise.

She moves through men she does not love, yet allows herself to be used, despite her apparent fluency in beauty, class, and their unspoken rules. That contradiction comes into focus with Trenchcoat, a luxury-goods arbitrager she pursues romantically. Through him, she enters a Hermès resale scheme governed by a logic that feels more fixed than nature itself: “Every year, regardless of poverty, war, or famine, the price of the Birkin bag increases.” What begins as satire settles into something colder—luxury as a closed system, impervious to consequence.

The novel reminded me of The Bell Jar—another young woman’s attempt to understand herself beyond accepted norms. While it was gendered expectation for Esther Greenwood’s character, for our narrator in The Coin, wealth, fashion, and education are the catalysts of her undoing. Later on in the novel, the garden she transforms her apartment into becomes an attempt at rebirth. She tries to become one with the earth, and as a reader you feel the devastation of beauty returning to something plain and repulsive. What begins vibrant and alive decays into an odorous heap of rot. Growth and decay are inseparable.

Overall, the writing is compulsively readable and frequently shocking. It reads as if Vogue briefly lost its mind, descended into literary madness, and then re-emerged without explanation. Zaher captures the absurdity of class, the intimacy of obsession, and the uncomfortable truth that self-knowledge does not always arrive gently, or leave us intact.

Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop

Review: 4.5 stars

Earlier in October, I was looking for a warm and cozy read - something that would be a salve for the soul. I adore books about booklovers, bookshops and writing, so when I saw ‘Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop’ featured on the Foyle’s homepage, I knew I had to read it.

I had recently decided to make a career change, and had been musing about how the next chapter would fit with the life I desire to lead. Coincidentally, Hwang Bo-Reum’s novel about Yeongju, a burnt out working professional who opens a bookshop to heal her soul, perfectly captured my sentiments. “…[T]he problem is that our society is too obsessed with work, and working takes away too many things from us. “It’s like we surface from the depths of work to get a breather, only to feel thoroughly spent. And when we return home after a long workday, we no longer have energy for leisure time or hobbies…When significant proportions of our time are spent working, recuperating from work, compensating for work, or doing the many things necessary in order to find, prepare for, and hold on to work, it becomes increasingly difficult to say how much of our time is truly our own”. This quoted passage from David Frayne’s ‘The Refusal of Work’, perfectly encapsulates one of the key contemplations in the novel - how to rest and work intentionally, in harmony.

The book’s atmosphere comes through powerfully - a particular feeling was the driving force of the novel, instead of plot or formal character development. The writing appeared effortless, matter-of-fact, simple and clean. This helped evoke a tranquil, drifting quality to each passage. Even moments of conflict or apprehension have rounded edges, dulled by each character’s inner contemplation which we are privy to.

The cast of characters also befriends the reader, each in his or her way. Minjun, once a striving university graduate, settles into the role of the perfectionist barista. Sangsu becomes a begrudging book sommelier to bookshop patrons (as well as the cashier). Jungsuh, Mincheol, Jimi and Seungwoo, each with their quiet backstories, have revolving seats at the sparse tables in the bookshop. The rise and fall of each of their narrative arcs plays out amongst the comings and goings of the daily bookshop routine. I found myself at times casting judgement on a decision a character had made, and then actively and mindfully retracting my opinion. The book was a good reminder that each person is processing, and making progress at their own pace, towards their unique goals, even if staying still is part of that progress.

In the Author’s Note, Bo Reum writes: “I wanted to write a novel evoking the mood of…a space we can escape to, a refuge from the intensity of daily life where we can’t even pause to take a breather. A space to shelter us from the harsh criticisms whipping us to do more, to go faster. A space to snuggle comfortably for a day.” This book was a resting stone for me, and I hope it is for other readers who are seeking similar solace.

The Devotion of Suspect X

Review: 3 stars

Since moving out to Oakville, I have been looking for a great book club to join. After digging around, I wasn’t able to find any group that really matched what I was looking for - acclaimed reads, literary discussion and serious book lovers. A book club based in Toronto ended up hitting the mark - and I read ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ with every intention of making the late evening trek out to join the discussion last night…only to be foiled by kidcare duty for my two rambunctious little ones.

‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ is one in a series of sophisticated and well-written whodunnits by Keigo Higashino, featuring a brilliant professor Yukawa and his shrewd detective friend Kusanagi. After a single mother, Yasuko, murders her abusive ex-husband in the opening chapters of this mystery, the reader embarks with her on a tense and cerebral journey to avoid capture by the police. She is aided by an oddball fairy godmother in the shape of her heavyset, middle-aged, taciturn neighbour Ishigami. He harbours ritual adoration for Yasuko, and channels his affection into helping to conceal the murder and create a trail of deflection for Kusanagi to erroneously follow. The novelty and brilliance of the story surfaces in the chessboard that Ishigami has set up for the detectives and his old college compatriot - Yukawa. Ishigami consistently outsmarts them through details and tactics, ending with a mind-bending caper that has all but Yukawa fooled.

Additional tension is injected as Yasuko begins to feel affection for an old acquaintance - Kudo. Once Ishigama learns of this budding sentiment, his purist devotion is put to the test. Yasuko, who once feared the shackles of prison, begins instead to fear that she must cage her heart in order to maintain her physical freedom.

I found ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ to be an easy, enjoyable read with a clever premise, and enough suspense to keep me engaged throughout. I did feel it to be lacking additional depth (e.g., exploration of more universal themes, innovative narration), and aside from Ishigami, the remainder of the characters were relatively flat. Not a regrettable read at all, but also unlikely to be one that I remember in years to come.

Catchpenny

Review: 4 stars

A week ago, I took my two children to the public library, and somehow managed to distract them enough to buy a few minutes to roam the adult floor. ‘Catchpenny’ was on a shelf of new books, and the premise of world redemption through witchcraft, suicide cults and a depressive anti-hero, was enough to catch my eye.

I settled in at one of my favourite coffee shops - Vereda Central Roasters - a few days later and launched headfirst into Charlie Huston’s cleverly constructed world. In his version of our today’s world, reflections can be “limned” from mirrors and transformed into real-life dopplegangers (albeit comprised of glass instead of flesh and blood.) Magic - or ‘mojo’ as it is referred to in the novel - is real. Raw emotions and revered rituals can birth powerful forces, which are channeled into inanimate objects - ‘curiosities’. This power can be tapped for many self-aggrandizing purposes, in addition to enabling travel between mirrors in disparate locations.

We meet Sid Catchpenny, our protagonist, as he is sought out by an estranged friend, Francois, to help a mother find her missing daughter, Circe. What ensues is a highly captivating and intricately woven thriller where we are constantly left wondering where the line between good and evil lies. Each of the countless characters - Monroe, Sue, Francois, Abigail, Circe, Carpenter, Sid - are desperately flawed, and also deeply misunderstood, adding to the complexity of assigning the roles of heroes and villains. Huston takes his time to unravel the twisted yarn connecting everyone, and in doing so, exposes to the reader that Sid, our guide through this narrative funhouse, fundamentally knows nothing…meaning we also know nothing until the climax of the novel.

I found the story well paced and easy to lose myself in. It was reminiscent of ‘The Matrix’ for me, with vocabulary and rules used to effectively cast the structure for an alternative reality. For example, the omnipresence of “mojo” throughout the story, establishing “courses” to direct the mojo to “vehemancers”, ‘manikins’ as the “limned” reflections, and the time-bound “Vestibule” in between mirrors. Sid is also a refreshing protagonist - self-deprecating, honest and a bit of a maverick. Popular cultural touchstones are catalysts of the plot and work very effectively to draw contemporary parallels to our current lived experiences - for example, Monroe’s parties are reminiscent of Woodstock or Coachella, Gyre is an interpretation of popular MMPORGs and youth’s timeless pursuit of meaning at all costs.

It was an excellent escapist read that also provoked discussion on how the power of emotion can be captured and used as a force. It asks whether apocalypse is evil, or if it can be seen as a renewal - the creation of something new from the dredges of a destabilizing and disintegrating world. And if renewal is possible, how can a new world order be constructed to be more equitable and selfless. ‘Catchpenny’ is definitely worth an exploration for a curious, fantasy-loving reader.

Forbidden Notebook

Review: 5 stars

During a recent business trip to London, I took a detour to the airport to visit Foyles, one of the largest and most impressive local bookstores. I was in heaven - imagine five stories of neatly stacked books, with feature tables and end-caps tiled with intriguing (not only bestselling) titles! I was specifically looking for ‘Forbidden Notebook’, which I have been wanting to read for a while.

The novel is set in 1950s Rome, and follows the inner narrative of Valeria Cossati, a committed mother to two, dedicated wife and office worker. On impulse in a tobacco shop, Valeria purchases a black notebook, in which she secretly chronicles all the things she does not say to those around her. This simple act of subterfuge - writing her thoughts in a diary - is a rare selfish indulgence for Valeria, and it sparks a re-education and re-examination of her entire life. It also unleashes a pandora’s box of deceit that infiltrates the household. Valeria’s daughter Mirella becomes ensnared in a scandalous romance with the much older Cantoni; her son Riccardo goes to the point of no return with his girlfriend Marina, and her husband Michele pursues a fraught partnership with her filmmaker friend Clara. These tribulations are tirelessly archived by Valeria in the midnight shadows. As she enters into evidence the thousand ways that her family transgresses against society, she realizes as well that they transgress against her rights to individualism. As she sheds her titles of ‘mamma’, ‘daughter’, ‘wife’, ‘friend’, ‘breadwinner’, ‘employee’, ‘paramour’, she simultaneously begins the process of reclaiming ‘Valeria’ for herself.

Elena Ferrante (of ‘My Brilliant Friend’ fame), listed Alba de Cespedes as an inspiration ina , single-handedly reviving recent interest in works that are over seventy years old. But the ideas are as fresh as ever. I would dub De Cespedes to be the 1950s predecessor to Esther Perel, a globally recognized couples therapist and love expert. The incisiveness of de Cespedes’ insights into motherhood and marriage, and how these come to define and unravel one another, was astonishing.

Throughout my reading, I found myself shaking my head in admiration for how perfectly crafted and revelatory her writing is. For example, as Valeria finds herself struggling to connect with her husband of over twenty years, she writes “I felt an uncontrollable sadness rising in me. I’m afraid that because my way of being seems so natural to him it no longer has any value in his eyes”. Then later, she attributes lack of intimacy in marriage to the following: “It’s because we feel that husband and wife who unite in an obscure, silent relationship, after talking all day about domestic matters, about money, after frying the eggs, washing the dirty plates, are no longer obeying a happy, joyful desire for love but a gross instinct like thirst, or hunger, an instinct that is satisfied inherent dark, rapidly, eyes closed. How monstrous.” Or even more poignantly, when forcing her daughter to admit a painful fault: “She spoke concisely, as if to consume as quickly as possible the need to wound herself and to wound”.

Even more interesting are the artificial narratives that Valeria constructs, even as she writes in the notebook - the one place she can be freely honest. Her reluctance and inability to piece together her husband’s infidelity, and how she conjures up a nemesis in her future daughter-in-law, become fictions that are logged as truths. The notebook in the end becomes a version of herself that Valeria vehemently denies, burning it to ashes to return to a skin she wants to wear again - that of the weary, saintly matriarch that gives everything and receives nothing.

One review of the book simply said it was “incendiary” and I cannot agree more wholeheartedly. I am in awe of how deftly de Cespedes took simple moments of everyday life and wove them into an intricate meditation on womanhood. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a lover of fiction at its finest, and to every mother who feels even the slightest bit unmoored.

Hot Milk

Review: 4 stars

I love browsing bookstores, especially with my sisters. On a trip to Toronto last fall, my older sister shared some of her favourite reads with me as we were perusing the stacks at Type Books on Queen. The one that got me intrigued was ‘Hot Milk’ by Deborah Levy. Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker, the novel follows Sofia and her mother Rose, on their Hail Mary journey to Almería, Spain for a cure for Rose’s mysterious limb paralysis.

In the opening pages, we learn that 25-year old Sofia is being inducted into adulthood, awash in the jarring taste of one’s first major failure. “The dream is over for me. It began when I left my lame mother alone to pick the pears from the tree in our East London garden that autumn I packed my bags for university…It ended when she became ill and I abandoned my Ph.D.” Over the course of the novel, we see Sofia become the foil to her previous self as she wades into new shapes and forms of being. She changes her occupation from ‘Waitress’ to ‘Monster’ on a health intake form over subsequent visits to a seaside first-aid hut. The stifling heat, incessant jellyfish stings and her pent up madness and desire have swirled into a combustible being. Sofia has emerged anew. She triumphantly frees a murderous dog from an abusive owner, takes a first aid student to be a lover and then takes Ingrid, a seamstress and her muse, also as a lover.

The irresistible tide of the Andalusian pilgrimage sucks Sofia in and upends the predictable prison she has created in her mind and the physical constraints of being her mother’s legs. At one point, Rose considers amputation to rid herself of the limbs that fail her. In actuality, her limbs are already severed from her, yet tethered to her - Sofia is her only source of mobility. A daughter as an extension, yet separation of one’s own self. As the novel reaches its conclusion, the severance becomes permanent - mother and daughter are more estranged than ever. One living an ever smaller, shorter, boxed-in life, and the other bursting with possibility, melted by the hot Spanish sun into something malleable, finding its organic shape day by day.

The writing is gorgeous, experimental and bold. Passages read like poetry, and Levy plays with form throughout - bulleted lists punctuate chapters, as do grammar-defying lines such as “I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised”. Just like hot milk, the writing froths over the reader, with only a pale residue remaining long past the last page, a stubborn mark that refuses to be forgotten. A searing, complex and enthralling read.