Quick Lit July 2022 Archives

Last Summer on State Street

by Toya Wolfe

This coming of age debut set in the housing projects of 1990s Chicago unfolds over the course of one summer. We meet three young girls, all about age 11, who've formed a comfortable trio and spend their summer days double-dutching on the hot concrete under the watchful eyes of their neighbors, who have all been alerted they'll soon be displaced and moved (if they're lucky) to a different apartment block. When a new girl joins their friend group the circle, instead of growing larger, is broken, and things will never be the same for any of the four, who are largely left on their own to deal with the escalating threats around them. Beautifully told and utterly heartbreaking. Content warnings apply.

Bluff: A Novel

by Michael Kardos

What a wild ride! I picked this up on the recommendation of Julia Whelan, who narrated the audiobook and mentioned when we chatted for a What Should I Read Next episode that Kardos's books, in her opinion, didn't get the recognition they deserved. At first this book reminded me very much of Maria Konnokova's The Biggest Bluff, about learning to play poker. In it, a twenty-something magician gets into financial trouble and decides to learn to cheat at cards to raise the extra cash she needs. She finds a mentor who will teach her how to manipulate the deck and dupe her fellow players into giving her all their money, and her once-modest quest to raise small sum evolves into a bigger con. When this story took an abrupt and grisly turn I wasn't expecting, I HATED it and wished I'd never begun it. (I could give you a very specific comp title but I fear it would reveal too much!) I kept reading and the reveal made me forgive everything. Dark, twisty, and utterly absorbing.

The Dead Romantics

by Ashley Poston

Set in the world of publishing, this delightful novel gives “ghostwriting” a double meaning. Florence Day makes her living writing bestselling romance novels that are published under somebody else's name; only one person knows the truth behind her facade as a personal assistant. This puts her in a tricky spot when she tries to tell her handsome new editor that she—er, her boss—won't be able to meet her deadline. She doesn't tell him the true problem: after a bad breakup, she doesn't believe in love anymore, so she sure can't write about it. Before she can force words on the page, her father dies. When she returns home for the first time in a decade she finds the family she loves (and the funeral home they run) the same as they've ever been, even though her father is gone. She also finds a ghost standing at the funeral home front door who looks remarkably like her editor, who seems to have died with unfinished business that's somehow connected to Florence. This open door ghost romance sounds bonkers, but it's sweet and fun and—as far as the audiobook was concerned—compulsively listenable.

The Measure

by Nikki Erlick

What a dynamite premise! The story begins on an ordinary day. Ordinary, that is, until citizens of the world open their front doors and discover a small wooden box that contains a single string, and each person's string reveals the exact length of their life. The unfolding story had me turning the pages at lightning speed even as it pondered a profound philosophical question: how would your life be different if you knew exactly when it would end? And would you even choose to find out that information, if you could? I really enjoyed the broad cast of characters, and watching how Erlick spooled out each of their individual stories and then slowly brought them into each other's orbits.

Easy Beauty: A Memoir

by Chloé Cooper Jones

From the publisher: "'I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.' So begins Chloé?Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor 'pain calculations' into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as 'less than.' The way she has been seen—or not seen—has informed her lens on the world her entire life. She resisted this reality by excelling academically and retreating to 'the neutral room in her mind' until it passed. But after unexpectedly becoming a mother (in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body), something in her shifts, and Jones sets off on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she’d been denied, and denied herself. From the bars and domestic spaces of her life in Brooklyn to sculpture gardens in Rome; from film festivals in Utah to a Beyoncé concert in Milan; from a tennis tournament in California to the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh, Jones weaves memory, observation, experience, and aesthetic philosophy to probe the myths underlying our standards of beauty and desirability and interrogates her own complicity in upholding those myths."

Booth

by Karen Joy Fowler

I’m still recommending Karen Joy Fowler’s 2013 novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves for lovers of compulsively readable literary fiction, so I can’t wait to sample her newest work, an epic exploration of John Wilkes Booth (yes, THAT Booth!) and his fascinating family. Fathered by a formerly celebrated and now reclusive Shakespearean actor, John and his siblings grow up in rural Maryland as the Civil War approaches. Later, the Booths leave farm life behind for theatrical fame—and eventually, the shameful notoriety of their brother’s actions. This new historical novel is richly detailed and darkly observant, perfect for fans of Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell.

Hurricane Girl

by Marcy Dermansky

From the publisher: "Allison Brody is thirty-two and newly arrived on the East Coast after just managing to flee her movie producer boyfriend. She has some money, saved up from years of writing and waitressing, and so she spends it, buying a small house on the beach. But then a Category 3 hurricane makes landfall and scatters her home up and down the shore, leaving Allison adrift. Should she go home from the bar with the strange cameraman and stay in his guest room? Is that a glass vase he smashed on her skull? Can she wipe the blood from her eyes, get in her car, and drive to her mother’s? Does she really love the brain surgeon who saved her, or is she just using him for his swimming pool? And is it possible to ever truly heal without seeking some measure of revenge? A gripping, provocative novel that walks a knife’s edge between comedy and horror, Hurricane Girl is the work of a singular talent, a novelist unafraid to explore the intersection of love, sex, violence, and freedom—while celebrating the true joy that can be found in a great swim and a good turkey sandwich."

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give

by Ada Calhoun

I blew through this essay collection on marriage, relationships, infidelity, divorce, and personal growth that came into being because of her viral Modern Love column, and made a hundred highlights along the way. This book would have horrified me when I was younger, but Will and I celebrated our 22nd anniversary this year: we're hardly newlyweds. To give you a taste: "'The first twenty years [of marriage] are the hardest,' an older woman once told me. At the time I thought she was joking. She was not." Or this: "Even good marriages sometimes involve flinging a remote control at the wall." I loved it.

The Midcoast

by Adam White

This slow-burning debut set in the tiny coastal town of Damariscotta is thick with atmosphere and middcoast fog. Our narrator is a Nick Carraway type, a writer and English teacher named Andrew who is not considered a true Mainer by the locals because he moved there—at the age of 3. You're only a true Mainer, he explains, if your parents are born here. This book is the ostensible manuscript Andrew wrote about the Thatch family, particularly father Ed Thatch, to document the family's rise and fall after it all came crashing down. Ed is a true local, having grown up in Damariscotta, an accomplished lobsterman before he graduated high school. He's revered locally as the small town boy made good, one who achieved financial success by working harder than anyone else. But Andrew is just one of many residents who's begun to wonder how Ed could make so much money from lobster alone, and if something suspicious might actually be going on right under their noses. Part small town portrait, part crime story, with a nonlinear structure that artfully carries the plot.

Quick Lit July 2022