“Homecoming” by Kate Morton is literary fiction featuring dual timelines, with a touch of mystery and a dash of family saga.
“Home is where the heart is, and the heart can be a dark and damaged place.”
In 1959, a family in Australia is found dead under suspicious circumstances, the youngest child missing. In 2018 a woman is just learning about this family history that her grandmother wanted to keep secret from her. Not everything was answered satisfactorily back then, but can she put all the pieces together now?
“There was no clear corollary between the two, and yet the first and firmest human addiction is to narrative. People seek always to identify cause and effect and then arrive at meaning…”
The overall story was pretty good (the mystery, the family tensions, the relationships), but honestly the choice to present much of the earlier timeline as a true crime book being read by characters within the story made for some boring reading. It wasn’t until around page 400 that things became more engaging.
“There was a truth observed by all good preachers, leaders, and salesmen: tell a good story, tell it in simple language, tell it often. That’s how beliefs and memories were formed. It was how people defined themselves, in a reliance upon the stories about themselves that they were told by others.”
Decent story, good prose, presentation was a swing and a miss (for this reader, at least)
We’re going backlist today, readers, but I was enamored with this wonderful and unique 2012 standalone YA Fantasy!
I swam across the torrent of my madness, and pulled myself upon the shore of a new and better sanity.
I think the YA categorization must be due to the protagonist’s age, not the sort of themes and issues it deals with. The overarching story is about a rebellion against an oppressive society. The dark aspects are navigated in a relatively gentle way–people die, but not in ways that are gruesomely depicted.
“Pull on a thread, and you pull the whole web. And then out come the spiders…”
Caverna is a city beneath a mountain. Its inhabitants do business with the outside world, but do not go there themselves. Children born there do not learn to mimic their caretaker’s faces, so they must be taught a repetoire of Faces to use at appropriate times (eg. Face No. 41, The Badger in Hibernation, a look of gruff interest).
Neverfell turned up in the Cheesemaster Grandible’s tunnels at the age of five with no memory of her life before, but it is clear she must have come from the outside because her face is constantly and effortlessly expressing the things she is thinking and feeling. This makes her an object of great interest and curiosity for many of Caverna’s denizens, but also puts her in a uniquely vulnerable position. Everyone else has only poker faces, after all, and you can imagine the court intrigue that ensues.
Neverfell wishes to learn where she came from, but whoever erased her memories the first time is willing to prevent that from happening by whatever means necessary.
This book is like what would happen if someone placed effervescent and earnest ingenue Anne of Green Gables in a world just as fantastical and mad, as whimsical and dangerous as the Tower in the Books of Babel by Josiah Bancroft. I loved the crazy cast of characters, from the Kleptomancer to the Cartographers. My favorite was the Grand Steward, though, who brought to mind Sheogorath of the Shivering Isles in the Elder Scrolls games. The leader of Caverna, the Grand Steward has learned to keep himself alive for centuries, but his body has been preserved at the price of his soul, and time has stolen from him the ability to feel any joy, pain, desire, or sorrow. Always alert for assassination attempts, he only allows one side of his brain to sleep at a time. When the right side of his brain sleeps, his right eye is open (being associated as it is with the left side of his brain), and the courtiers know to expect that Right-Eye will be cold but fair, logical to a fault. Left-Eye is the one responsible for any of their ranks falling into or out of favor on a whim.
Right-Eye was not amused. He had known for centuries that he could trust nobody but himself. Now he was seriously starting to wonder about himself.
The Grand Steward finds Neverfell of particular interest because by watching her face as she reacts to things, it’s almost as if he can feel those emotions for himself once again. She also presents him with a rare opportunity for some self-reflection.
Nobody in four hundred years had dared to look at him with such disappointment and saddened anger.
I found these things about the Grand Steward to be such a fun and spectacular part of the story!
A rollicking adventure that addresses some serious themes, the narration of this story was also very funny at times.
For the first time it occurred to Neverfell that perhaps he did not know what to do with stolen goods that did not stay where he put them but instead screamed, ran around, and threatened to eat his correspondence. Perhaps he did not really know what to do with people at all.
All around I found this to be an original, fun, and touching story.
For a while I thought this would be an average 3 star read for me, since some truly insufferable characters were being pretty evenly balanced with how well this book made me feel absolutely transported to Italy 🇮🇹🍝🌊☀️
But then, lo! The story includes the protagonist recognizing what about her life is problematic, and then her decision to address it, making it a more satisfying read.
Katy is 30 years old when her mother, Carol, dies. She is lost without “the love of her life”, the woman who had all the answers, the person she defined herself in relation to. She decides to go by herself to Italy on the trip she and her mother were supposed to take together. While there she meets, among other people…her mother, 30 years ago!
Katy is emotionally stunted, has dysfunctional family relationships, and makes some poor choices while grieving. But by whatever magic her trip to Positano has created to allow her to see a past version of her mother, Katy begins to see that Carol was also only human. She learns that she’ll need to work on herself and learn who she is now that her mother is gone before moving forward.
“She made me in her image, but she forgot the most important part. She forgot that one day she’d leave, that she already had, and then I’d be left with nothing. When you’re just a reflection, what happens when the image vanishes?”
This was a touching story featuring personal growth, set against the flavors of the Amalfi Coast. A great summer read!
The year is halfway over, and I’ve been reading more than ever! My goal was 60 books, and I’ve met that already in early July.
In no particular order, here are my top ten of the books I have read so far this year:
“What Moves the Dead” by T. Kingfisher was the first book I read this year, and the first of this author’s work I have ever read, and she has since earned a place as an “auto buy” for me! This is a queer novella retelling of “The Fall of the House of Usher”
“A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” by Holly Jackson was a book club pick this year, and this YA murder mystery was perfect for fans of true crime
“Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt is heartwarming contemporary fiction featuring found family and a curmudgeonly octopus
“Invisible Monsters Remix” by Chuck Palahniuk is one wild ride about loneliness, boredom, beauty, and attention, conveying important messages through the maddest of methods
“Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries” by Heather Fawcett is darkly delightful fantasy about a socially awkward academic who must learn to become part of a community, and featuring a charming romance (tbh, I enjoyed the ARC of the sequel even more, but the publish date for that one isn’t until January of 2024)
“The Golden Spoon” by Jessa Maxwell is a cozy mystery that mixes Clue with The Great British Bake-off, with a dash of historical family saga
“The Ferryman” by Justin Cronin is a standalone science fiction novel that deals with climate crisis, dystopia, and what makes for a meaningful life
“Trust” by Hernan Diaz is literary fiction with a very creative structure about whose voices get heard, and what affords the power to effectively shape reality to one’s liking
“The Mountain in the Sea” by Ray Nayler is science fiction that examines communion, consciousness, and control through the lenses of AI and a hyper intelligent octopus species
“A House with Good Bones” by T. Kingfisher is Southern Gothic horror with wonderful characters, amusing narration, and a perfectly spooky vibe
But it turned out people didn’t want things to be nice, they wanted them to be familiar.
“The Half Moon” by Mary Beth Keane is contemporary fiction about a married couple in crisis.
Malcolm and Jess are in their forties. They’ve spent years, and a small fortune, on trying to get pregnant. Malcolm owns a bar, The Half Moon, but thanks to some unsound financial decisions and the struggle to compete with the newer bars and microbreweries, things are not going well in that department, either. Dreams are crumbling, mistakes are made, and these two find themselves facing some really tough decisions. 👰♀️🤵♂️👶🏼🍻📉
He stopped himself from saying it aloud, but they knew each other so well that the air between them became legible, and she could read it anyway.
My minor gripes: 1) I believe Malcolm’s attraction to Jess was explained on three separate occasions (if not more) as because “she was different from other girls”, and 2) the fact that people who assume that everyone thinks New York City is the Best Thing Ever just because they do is a big pet peeve of mine (and the assumption here that no newly single person might actually want to live in the suburbs).
Lastly, I have no idea what half the words in this quote mean: “[he] shaped for per diem work with the sandhogs. He was a little on the old side, but he had a hook…” Shaped for work? Sandhogs? A hook? Huh?
But overall the writing was very good, and the characters felt quite real, as did their experiences. I didn’t necessarily enjoy how the feelings the story engendered were mostly depression and claustrophobia, but there is certainly hope here, as well, and a theme throughout of starting anew and choosing to redirect the story of your life.
The things they didn’t end up doing, the places and people they decided against, all defined them as much as anything else, in the way negative space defines a photo or a song.
Jessica Crawford 