The Collected Regrets of Clover, by Mikki Brammer

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Clover, a quirky, awkward, and introverted 36-year-old, is fine living alone. She observes friendships and romances in films and the uncurtained window of the apartment across the street, but she has little need of them herself. It’s too hard to explain to people that what she knows best is death—death and the dying.

At five, Clover witnessed her kindergarten teacher’s death. Then, only a year later, her parents died in an accident while on vacation while traveling, leaving her to be brought up by her grandfather in New York City. She still lives in his West Village apartment, although he, too, died some years ago while she was traveling. Partly out of guilt at not being there for him, she became a death doula.

I’d never heard of a death doula, but apparently it’s a thing. Clover holds the hands of the dying, listens to their stories, helps them sort out their affairs. We all seek to understand the great mystery of death, don’t we? For Clover, the clues lie in their last words, which she writes in three journals that she has titled “Regrets,” “Advice,” and “Confessions.” She also likes to attend death cafés, where people gather to discuss death and share their experiences. Even there she’s only an observer. Her only real friend is Leo, her elderly black neighbor, who had been her grandfather’s best friend.

Things start to change when she meets Sebastian at a death café. He says he’s afraid of death and asks her to spend time with his dying grandmother. Ninety-one-year-old Claudia turns out to be a firecracker, a former journalist, whose one regret inspires Clover to go in search of the man from Claudia’s past. At the same time, Sebastian keeps turning up and—to her horror—eventually asks her out. When a friendly woman her age moves into the apartment downstairs, Clover tries to avoid having to meet her, but fails. Sylvie’s kindness and normalcy throw Clover’s isolation into relief and begin to wear down her resistance.

This intricate and surprising story manages to sidestep sentimentality and cliché. We are deep in Clover’s point of view as she reflects on her past decisions, her relationships, and the choices she has made. The author has blended these flashbacks into the story beautifully; also Clover’s introspective moments are handled well.  

I found this a lovely story, quiet and deep. Clover’s inexperience with social customs felt unforced and real, as did her compassion for and insight into those who are at the end of their lives. She shares a few tidbits from her three journals; I would love to read more.

Have you ever read a story about a death doula?

How to Love Your Daughter, by Mila Blum

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Translated from Hebrew by Daniella Zamir

As this short introspective novel opens, Yoella has come from Israel to Groningen in the Netherlands to stand outside her daughter Leah’s home. She does not approach the door. Instead she looks in at a window to see Leah with her husband and two children. It has been ten years since she has seen her beloved daughter, during which men would occasionally call her to say her daughter was safe but hiking in Nepal or some such place without phone connectivity. She has only just learned that it was all a lie. Leah, now 28, has been here all this time.

And because I was watching my daughter and her family without their knowledge, I was vulnerable to witnessing what wasn’t mine to witness.

Such a rift begins to seem impossible as Yoella describes her immense love for baby Leah. We are entirely in her mind, absorbing her memories and insights, with only a rare piece of dialogue or gesture recounted to indicate what Leah and Meir’s perspectives might be.

My love for my baby daughter came easily. Her father was also in love with her; we talked about her every night after she fell asleep, thanked each other for the gift that was our girl. Everything that I had been denied I gave to her, and then some. And she loved me too.
 

In a quiet, mesmerizing voice, Yoella moves back and forth in time, describing Leah’s perfect childhood—a star at school and in her ballet classes—and the tight bond between the two of them. Yoella’s husband Meir is older and busy with his work, yet he, too, adores the child. The two of them seem to have a special understanding.

The fractures appear as she begins to reveal tidbits from her own troubled childhood and the silences in her relationship with Meir. Woven into her thoughts are brief insights about mothers and daughters from the stories she’s reading by authors such as Anne Enright, Margaret Atwood, and Alice Munro.

I think we are supposed to be in suspense about the cause of their rift until near the end of the book. However, the suffocating nature of this woman’s all-consuming love for her daughter, made me want to run away from her almost from the beginning, and I’m not even related to her. She’s the kind of mother who follows her daughter everywhere, kisses her on the lips even as she’s leaving home at 18, and prefers to cuddle close and sleep in her daughter’s bed rather than her husband’s. She makes me appreciate my own mother’s distance.

The writing is lovely and the chapters very short; Yoella doesn’t linger in any fragment of memory for long. It becomes an interesting psychological portrait, as she reveals—perhaps without meaning to—the way she manipulates Leah, and the lies and evasions she uses to paper over the cracks in her life.

The mother-daughter relationship is an endless source of interesting variations. That this one came to feel to me like a horror story probably says more about me than the book. It certainly made me reflect on my life with my own mother and with my children. There are so many ways we can go wrong, so many ways we can inadvertently injure these vulnerable beings we are responsible for. Yoella says we are all “… survivors, everyone was given either too much or too little, life is always a long journey of healing from childhood.”

What story about mothers and daughters has moved you?

The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp, by Leonie Swann

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There’s a body in the woodshed at Sunset Hall, Agnes’s home that she’s turned into co-housing for other elderly folks. They include Bernadette who’s blind, wheelchair-bound Winston, flighty Edwina who practices yoga and bakes impossible biscuits, and Marshall who sometimes goes off into la-la land. And of course Hettie the tortoise.

Agnes already has a lot on her plate: finding her false teeth, the occasional ringing in her ears that renders her temporarily deaf, and having to take the stairs when the doorbell rings because the stairlift is broken. The door turns out to be the police to tell them about the fatal shooting of a neighbor, Mildred Puck. The murder may be a solution to one of Agnes’s problems.  To add to the confusion, a new resident arrives: Charlie who has a fabulous wardrobe, a mind as yet untinged with dementia, and a dog named Brexit. Then Marshall brings in his grandson Nathan without prior authorization. The television gets moved to the basement, but not because of the grandson.

A lot of quirky characters, but it’s easy to keep them straight in this fun mystery. The way they have to navigate their disabilities adds a bit of shading to the story, along with a lot of unexpected suspense. I quickly became attached to these pensioners, and their surprisingly shadowy pasts.

I’ve been thinking about a post I read recently by Leigh Stein. She discusses John Truby’s idea that a story should have a designing principle, some way of organising the story as a whole. It can be the way it uses time—such as the film Titanic which unfolds in real time—or the perspective from which it’s told—such as Darling Girl, by Liz Michalski a story of Peter Pan from the point of view of Wendy’s granddaughter.

The designing principle is like a plot twist but in the story as a whole, in the story’s premise. In this cosy mystery, the first twist is that the amateur detectives are elderly. We’ve seen that before, from Miss Marple to the Thursday Club mysteries. So the second twist is that almost all of them are disabled in some way that affects the plot. And then the third twist is that they all have unexpected pasts.

I enjoyed this mystery a lot, though it took me a while to work out what rules had been established by the residents for their co-housing situation at Sunset Hall. This is what Ray Rhamey calls an information question rather than a story question. Withholding information about the world of the story creates irritation rather than the suspense we get from true story questions (what’s going to happen next?). Aren’t you wondering why the corpse is in the woodshed? That’s a story question all right. This is a small quibble, and not something that I have to worry about as I chase down the rest of the series.  

Have you read a story where a tortoise plays an important role?

Hush Hush, by Laura Lippman

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I was thrilled when this twelfth book in Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series came out in 2015. I decided to save it for a moment when I really needed it, a moment that came this week. Hush Hush is everything I hoped it would be and more. Lippman is in top form, digging into the darkness of family life—and its joys too.

After the death of her baby, Melisandre Harris Dawes was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity (postpartum psychosis). She spent some time in rehab and then moved to South Africa and then England. Her husband Stephen had full custody of the two older girls, Alanna and Ruby. Now, twelve years later, Melisandre has returned to Baltimore to reclaim her daughters—now teenagers—and her reputation.

A stunning woman, imbued with the glamour and confidence of old-style Baltimore wealth, Melisandre expects to impose her will on everyone around her. She has hired a filmmaker to create a documentary about her trial, supposedly to expand public understanding of the verdict. Interviews for this documentary crop up between chapters, adding new insights for the reader. Mindful of her notoriety, she has contacted her old flame, lawyer Tyner Gray, for help.

Through Tyner—Tess’s friend, mentor and husband of her beloved aunt—Tess has been hired by Melisandre to look into her security. It’s not work Tess and her new partner, ex-policeman Sandy Sanchez usually do, but Tess is feeling the financial pinch of being a parent. The interweaving of the investigation with Tess’s home life—deepening relationship with Crow, adoration of their three-year-old daughter Carla Scout, and the inevitable complicated scheduling of their work and day care—furnish an extra level of depth to the story.

The theme of mothers and daughters is one of those universal themes that always draws my attention. The subtheme of questioning what constitutes good parenting adds complexity and further deepens my interest. Both Tess and Melisandre receive anonymous notes criticising their parenting, though most parents (me included) don’t need outside critics in order to question themselves. I’ve been faced with more than one toddler meltdown in a busy grocery store and could thoroughly identify with Tess’s reaction. Carla Scout is not the first three-year-old with Big Feelings whom I’ve encountered.

The mystery itself is satisfyingly twisty. Alanna’s rebellion against, well, everything and Ruby’s tendency to search out secrets and hold them close complicate the story, as does their young stepmother’s struggle to care for her own new baby. Sandy Sanchez adds a gravitas to the story and another point of view. Lippman does a good job of showing how his strengths align with Tess’s. As events escalate, each character adds to the richness of the story.

The story felt especially poignant for me because I left Baltimore a few years ago after a lifetime there. On the trail with Tess, crisscrossing the city, even visiting some of my formerly regular spots left me a little homesick.

I’ve read and enjoyed Lippman’s standalone novels since Hush Hush came out. If you search my blog you’ll find seven other Lippman novels I’ve reviewed. I am still hoping for another Tess story.

What’s your favorite Laura Lippman book? Do you have a favorite spot in Baltimore?

Faraway Tables, by Eric D. Goodman

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In his first collection of poems, Goodman moves around in time and space, recalling past travels, anticipating the future, both near and far. Most of all, he pays attention to the world, noting small details as he finds meaning in seemingly ordinary moments, whether it’s making a cup of coffee or winding the clock. 

In “Relics” he and a childhood friend, newly reunited, explore Baltimore’s Museum of Industry.

Decades may have passed between us,

but our bond remains durable,

like these vestiges of a bygone age.


We consider the divergent occurrences in our lives

as we glance at the vintage printing press,

a demonstration sharing with us

how easily the movable letters connect,

disconnect, reconnect.

Having reviewed two of his novels on this blog, Setting the Family Free and Wrecks and Ruins, I  can detect fingerprints of those stories here. There’s the appreciation of things that are imperfect or ephemeral. There’s also an appreciation of other points of view, such as in “Pests” where he considers the effect of the pandemic shutdown on mice and other creatures who prowl the cubicles at night searching for cookie crumbs and trail mix.

Many of these poems were written during the pandemic, such as “Embracing Hermithood” which begins:

The hair is the first to grow.

The salt-and-pepper business cut

filling out into a lion’s mane,

gushing down the head and over the shoulders

like a SWAT team’s rappelling ropes over a fortress

during the raid on an out-of-control dictator

threatening our nation.

He touches on and personalizes recent events, such as the war in Ukraine. He remembers a trip by his children to Kiev shortly before the war and his own visit to Russia “just after the Iron Curtain fell.”

When this passes,

let my adult children stand

in Independence Square again

alongside the children

of my Ukrainian and Russian friends

and let the new generation toast

to international friendship

just as we did, so sincerely, not so long ago.

Some of the poems address aspects of the climate emergency—like drought and falling water levels—and consumerism—such as the social costs of avocado toast and bottled water. Humor and the music of words come together in poems such as “Dogged Memories” which begins:

Oh, Bratwurst,

I’ve spent time with you in the rowdy beer halls of Munich,

pierced you with fork and pulled you from a pool of kraut,

dipped you in spiced mustard and washed you down with bitter beer.

As Goodman notes in his Afterword, poetry is appropriate for today’s readers because it is not only short but also concise, conveying idea or emotion with few words. He also notes that the pandemic was “a time to question life as we know it,” looking back on what we’ve experienced and imagining the new world awaiting us.

What poems have you been reading during this National Poetry Month?

Brother of the More Famous Jack, by Barbara Trapido

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What a delight this novel is! I wrote a couple of weeks ago about “pleasure buttons:” the aspects of fiction that provide a pleasurable experience for readers. The missing one in that discussion turns out to be wit.

In Trapido’s debut novel, 18-year-old Katherine is eager to explore the world outside her mother’s petit-bourgeois bungalow, but is at first hesitant and only too aware of her own naïveté. It’s telling that in times of stress she turns to her favorite novel: Jane Austen’s Emma.

Lacking Emma’s self-assurance, Katherine assumes she’s blown her interview with the philosophy professor Jacob Goldman. She’s chosen philosophy as a shortcut to worldly wisdom, and does not realise that he’s thoroughly enchanted with her original bent of mind. He sees through her youthful lack of confidence to the potential rogue adventurer lurking underneath.

She then gets picked up by the much older John Millet, charmed by his aesthetic knowledge, not recognising that however much he flirts with her, what really turns him on are young men.  John carries her off for a weekend which turns out to be with the Goldman family: Jacob, a very pregnant Jane, and their many children.

The house, as it presents itself from the road, is like a house one might see on a jigsaw puzzle box, seasonally infested with tall hollyhocks. the kind one put together on a tea tray while recovering from the measles.

There’s the family you’re born with and the family you choose, and Katherine finds her real home with the eccentric and outrageous Goldman clan, quite aside from falling head over heels with oldest son Roger. They all adore her right back—even Roger, for a while anyway. In Jane, she finds her true parent.

[Jane] stands hugely in strong farmer’s wellingtons into which she has tucked some very old corduroy trousers. She has these tied together under a man’s shirt with pajama cords because the zip won’t come together over the bulge. Bits of hair are falling out of her dark brown plait.”

This hilarious, madcap novel is full of quips like the title. However, running alongside is a pungent critique of class in Britain, anti-Semitism, and women’s roles. First published in 1982, it might seem dated to modern readers, particularly the debate over women’s issues, such as motherhood vs work, and who does the dishes. However, recent events, such as the current push in the U.S. by a minority of radical evangelists to remove women from the workforce and keep them in the kitchen or making babies, make it newly relevant. It’s a good reminder that women’s gains toward equality have only come about recently and still encounter panic-stricken backlash.

Even the most revolting characters, such as macho Michele “a backward-looking romantic with right-wing views and left-wing friends” come across as hilarious when seen through Katherine’s amused and loving eyes, and then turn around and redeem themselves unexpectedly. It shouldn’t work; I should be horrified by some of the things these characters get up to.

Somehow, though, Katherine’s eagerness for adventure and the sheer number of fantastical goings-on lead to a suspension, not only of disbelief but of censure. I was swept up in a witty fairy tale and willing to go along with Katherine. Toward the end of the novel, a bit of sanity returns as Katherine, older and wiser, begins to see through the smokescreen of antic fun.

The story was not so much laugh-out-loud funny as snort-and-snicker witty, making it the sort of comedy I most relish. I thorough enjoyed this delightful novel and can’t wait to explore some of Trapido’s later works.

What novel has most amused you lately?

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

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Put six people from five countries into the International Space Station orbiting Earth and leave them there for several years. Now write about a single day, which encompasses sixteen orbits, so sixteen sunrises, sixteen sunsets. I immediately imagined around a dozen different stories that could come out of this premise.

I never imagined Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.

I am stunned by the gorgeous language. When Chie sees the islands of her native Japan, they look like “a trail of drying footprints. Her country is a ghost haunting the water.”

When Roman glances out a window in passing, “the view is at first indistinct. It takes a moment to orientate. An expanse of wintry nothingness, pearly cloud cover, and then the familiar gleam of ice sheets sloping off the Antarctic Circle. Starboard, the seven sisters audaciously bright.”

From space, borders and boundaries blur. Within their small metallic bubble, we see the astronauts and cosmonauts—from Britain, the U.S., Japan, Italy, and two from Russia—sometimes individually and sometimes as a group as they go about their days. They exercise to preserve their legs and hearts, pursue their scientific experiments, manage the effects of weightlessness.

They have moments of awe—wonder and terror—at the boundless space around them. “Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it is stalking through their quarters.” Sometimes they feel themselves remote from those on the planet below them, unable to intervene in looming catastrophes. At other times, they are affected by news from home and memories. Shaun recalls a high school lesson about the Velázquez painting Las Meninas and the shifting possibilities of subject and perspective. A postcard of the painting is one of the things he brought with him.

Haley Larsen recently wrote on Substack about the use of free indirect narration. When we talk about different points of view, we’re describing different degrees of narrative distance from the characters. For example, first person PoV is the most intimate, providing access to the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings, while third person is sometimes compared to a camera over the protagonist’s shoulder with no access to thoughts or feelings. Free indirect narration is when the author’s lens moves in and out, between a narrow focus on one character and a wider zoom.

Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, Orbital is a brilliant example of this narrative technique. Not only does the author zoom from all-seeing narrator to the group aboard the space station to a single astronaut/cosmonaut, but through the six people we see the earth as a whole, individual places (e.g., the pyramids), a family, a single person on earth. That movement in and out IS the story’s movement. Amazing.

In a recent blog post, author and teacher C.S. Lakin writes, “I was reading A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and I was struck by a passage that didn’t filter the world through the characters’ eyes but used a shared experience to reveal their reality.” That shared experience was hunger. She goes on to say, “[T]aking the perspective of a singular force, such as hunger, can be a powerful way to reveal not just one character’s experience but the life of an entire community.”

The community in Orbital is the six people aboard the space station. To me, though, they are an example of synecdoche, where a part of something is used to signify the whole. They are all of us, riding on this increasingly fragile planet.

I loved the book and, finishing it, immediately started again. I continue to return to it. I could write a whole essay about each tiny part. However, not everyone in my book club enjoyed it. While this is a novel, you won’t find much in the way of plot. It is more a collection of poetry, of meditations about humans and our Earth, embodied in six memorable people and their remarkable experiences.

Have you read a novel that simply astounded you?

The Light Between Oceans, by M. L. Stedman

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In 1926 Tom Sherbourne becomes the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, a lonely spot off the southwestern coast of Australia. It’s a lonely job, with a supply boat only visiting once a quarter, but Tom enjoys it. After a shattering four years fighting in WWI, Tom returned to Australia and began learning the lighthouse trade, attracted by the quiet life, the precision required, and the opportunity to save lives. On a rare shore leave he meets and marries Isabel who adjusts quickly to life on the island and looks forward to raising a family.

Unfortunately she suffers two miscarriages and a stillbirth. So when a boat washes ashore with a dead man and a live baby, she calls it a miracle. Tom, a principled man, wants to report it immediately, but Isabel persuades him to wait, arguing that the mother must have been washed overboard and drowned. The stillbirth is recent enough that Isabel is able to nurse the baby.

Stedman wonderfully evokes the fierce love of parents for a child, as well as Tom’s love for Isabel. Their quiet, isolated life on the island is idyllic. However, when the child is two, they have leave to go to town on the mainland for the first time in three years and, during that visit they are forcibly reminded of the lives of others. While Isabel is fixated on the child, Tom finds himself in a moral quandary.

Stedman’s debut novel appealed to me first because of the setting; I love a lighthouse novel. Tom also appealed to me in some ways: reserved and moral, meticulous in his care of the light, steadfast in his love for Isabel and Lucy. However, I found the book’s premise hard to believe unless the characters were completely self-centered, but then I’ve always held to the philosophy that children come first; what’s best for them is my priority. Too many of these characters give that idea lip service and then do what they want.

I still enjoyed much of the story, though. I recently read a post by Leigh Stein on her Attention Economy Substack where she mentioned the work of Dr. Jennifer Lynn Barnes, a novelist and former psychology professor. I also watched the Grammar Girl interview of Barnes on YouTube that Stein mentions. Believing that novels succeed when they provide their readers with pleasure, Barnes took a scientific approach to identifying the primary pleasure buttons. She came up with six: beauty, money & wealth, status & power, sex & touch, competition, and danger.

It’s an interesting idea, and one that fits this popular novel. The landscape of the light, the sea, and the sky is beautifully drawn. Of all the senses, touch is the one that stays with me from this story: Lucy’s soft cheek, the feel of salt spray from a rough sea. There’s competition and danger, and the potential loss of status and power. The only pleasure button missing is money, which is not a motivation for anyone in the story, but there’s another kind of wealth: family and community.

And I did take pleasure in this story, despite the unlikely premise and some unlikeable characters. It captures the joy of bathing a baby and playing with a toddler. It made for good bedtime reading.

What novel have you read recently that gave you pleasure? What about it made you feel that way?

Brave the Wild River, by Melissa L. Sevigny

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Subtitled The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, this nonfiction book rescues a story, misrepresented at the time and now forgotten by all but scientists. In 1938 botanist and University of Michigan professor Elzada Clover and her student Lois Jotter set off down the—at the time—untamed Colorado River with four men in homemade boats.

The women’s goal was to survey the plant life of the Grand Canyon for the first time. Only a very few people had ridden the Colorado—considered the most dangerous river in the world—through the Grand Canyon and survived. The media, of course, went wild over the idea of women going on such an expedition, and throughout the entire experience concentrated on their clothes and appearance, without mentioning botany or the women’s work.

Drawing on the journals of Clover, Jotter and three of the men, as well as her own background as a science journalist, Sevigny has created a thrilling and very human story of these two women and their accomplishments, which botanists and ecologists still rely on today. She brings to life the sensation of entering each new section of the river: the rapids, the soaring stone walls, the way storm clouds seem to boil down into canyons.

The interactions between the group are touched on lightly: the inevitable irritations, the teasing, and the mutual support and little kindnesses that carry the day. While the story concentrates on Clover and Jotter’s experience, the others are presented as well, especially the expedition leader Norman Nevills and Buzz Holmstrom (who did not travel with them).

Holmstrom was one of the few who had run the river and survived and, on hearing of the projected expedition, famously said, “Women . . . do not belong in the Canyon of the Colorado.” However, he came to respect and support Clover and Jotter. He followed their journey and, when possible, provided assistance. Afterwards, he was the only person Clover could talk with about how much she missed the river.

The author also slips in bits of background as needed. Much of the science we take for granted today was still in flux, such as evolution, the great age of the Earth, or the idea that plants or animals could become extinct. Continental drift was first proposed in 1912 was still considered nonsense. Geologists “did not yet believe land masses could unmoor themselves and go rollicking around the planet like bumper cars.”

Sevigny brings out the different ways plant life was being categorized and understood at the time, such as the idea that “plant communities advanced through stages of development to a final, stable stage, which might be forest, prairie, tundra or desert, depending on the region’s climate.” This culmination of this process—called succession—was thought to be a “climax community” which would then never change again. Of course, we see today how that explanation is insufficient, but Clover and Jotter were among the first to advocate a systems approach—what we understand as ecology today.

This is a gorgeous story of courage and camaraderie. Whether you’re looking for a thrilling adventure, an immersion in a strange and beautiful landscape, or a forgotten piece of women’s history, this is a great read.

Can you recommend a narrative nonfiction book about a forgotten piece of history?

Lost in the Never Woods, by Aiden Thomas

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In this retelling of Peter Pan, Wendy Darling lives in Astoria, Oregon, a small town where children have begun disappearing. People turn to her because she and her brothers also went missing five years earlier. She has no answers because when she did turn up in the woods, she remembered nothing of what happened. Michael and John have never returned.

When Wendy, on her eighteenth birthday, almost runs over a boy lying in the middle of a forest road, she discovers that the Peter Pan of the childhood stories her mother told them is real. He’s left Neverland to recruit Wendy’s help in finding the missing children.

It’s clear that Thomas put a lot of thought and imagination into how to adapt the magic of the J.M. Barrie original to the modern world. I especially like how he characterises the antagonist. Also, he’s done a good job of understanding issues such as grief, guilt, and PTSD. The damage to the Darling family, in particular, struck me as genuine.

Unfortunately, I came near to setting it aside unfinished, despite so much I liked about it and my own fascination with Peter Pan. Only the fact that I was listening to it as an audiobook while doing chores and commuting enabled me to stay with it. So what lessons can I as a writer draw from this Young Adult novel and NYT bestseller?

Go for broke with the cover. The book’s cover is fabulous! It draws you in to the tangled woods with their tempting flowery path and threatening blue and mauve trees. And the mysterious faces in silhouette. Who wouldn’t want to pick up a book with a cover like this?

Take time to describe your main characters with surprising sensory details. The early descriptions of Peter charmed me, with so many wonderful details such as twigs in his hair, the woodsy scents that accompany him, the oddball clothes that he’s picked up in Wendy’s world. I loved this aspect of the story.

Make sure your characters feel like real people. Sadly, after the wonderful description of Peter, he and Wendy, not to mention her family and best friend, come across as one-note characters. This is especially problematic with Wendy, since she is our point-of-view character.

Vary your pacing. The whole story is at fight-or-flight level. Wendy starts the story freaking out and, aside from one or two brief moments of connection, she spends the entire story at the same panicked level. Many Goodreads reviewers complained about slow pacing. I attribute this reaction to the pedal-to-the-metal emotional level, the absence of character development, and the scarcity of actual actions Wendy and Peter take to solve the problem.

These problems could be attributed to a rush to publish a second novel in 2021 after the big success of Thomas’s debut novel Cemetery Boys in 2020. Most writers labor for years on their first novel trying to make it perfect in this difficult marketplace. Then the follow-up doesn’t have a chance to get as much attention.

I’m impressed by Thomas’s productivity. I’m also taking a lesson from the way he interacts with his fans online, from his fun bio to the way he addresses them directly.  Given the very positive reviews for Cemetery Boys, I will give that one a try. I’m also looking forward to seeing how this promising writer develops over his next few books.

What Young Adult book laced with a bit of magic have you enjoyed?