Greetings, my friends. Happy June. Happy PRIDE Month. I have a bunch of posts in drafts that are almost ready for you, but not quite. In the meantime, I thought we’d do a little recap followed by two book reviews.
May was somewhat uneventful but it was a busy month workwise and on the home front. Some highlights:
Both kids are home for the summer. College Girl is working at the library on campus and College Boy is doing an online summer class.
The girl and I hit up two book sales this month, making the current total of print books in this house just shy of 800. It’s probably more than that because I know there are some that are unaccounted for.
I spent a great (albeit rainy) Saturday afternoon with a high school friend who was in Pittsburgh for the weekend. Her son plays baseball for the Miami Hurricanes and they were in town for a series against Pitt. She got me a ticket to the game and despite a loss, it was a fun day. (They made up for it with a Mother’s Day win.)
My big goal this summer is to significantly reduce my social media usage, particularly Facebook and Instagram. (I don’t do Twitter or TikTok, and YouTube and Substack don’t count.) I’ve tried this in the past with so-so results, but for whatever reason, it’s working and I like it.
I’ve been obsessed with The National’s new album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein. Absolutely love it.
I read 8 books in May and plan to have a recap of those for you soon. Here are two of them.
Last Circle of Love by Lorna Landvik (Lake Union Publishing, 2022, 275 pages)
I needed a lighthearted book during a particularly stressful week, and selected this because of its original premise: Charlene, Bunny, Marlys, Evie, and Velda are members of the Naomi Circle, a women's group at All Souls Lutheran Church. Their congregation is struggling financially and the members (at least the women we meet in the novel) are jealous and resentful of a nearby affluent megachurch, Prince of Peace.
Motivated by this, the women (supported by their young pastor, Mallory "Pastor Pete" Peterson) have an idea to do a twist on their usual fundraiser: What if, instead of a cookbook, they write "The ABCs of Erotica" featuring tips for each letter of the alphabet to keep one's relationship spicy?
So far, so good. Throughout the rest of the novel, the women reflect on their lives and relationships and write their submissions. Secrets are revealed and truths are realized. But, unfortunately, there are some glaring, significant flaws with this novel.
Let's start with the term erotica. These women aren't writing a book about erotica in the sense that one might imagine. Their perspective is that anything can be erotic -- a chin, for example, or demonstrating gallantry. OK, fine, I can buy that. But they throw around the term like it's something scandalous, and after the first few instances of this, it becomes absurd and gimmicky.
There are entirely too many characters. Not only do we have the five women in the Naomi Circle, but we have their spouses, their children, their grandchildren (and in one case, A GRANDCHILD'S COLLEGE ROOMMATE'S FRIEND) a former college friend, and their in-laws. We have Pastor Pete, her husband, their toddler son, and LeeAnn, Pastor Pete's best friend, and her spouse. We have the church's custodian and his brother. We have the nursing home worker who takes care of one woman's husband who has dementia. And all of these people have backstories, and we get most of them. For a 275-page novel, that's...a lot. And most of them want to submit their own story to the book. It would have been much better if we just focused on the Naomi Circle women and their relationships.
The writing, particularly the dialogue, felt clunky and in need of at least another edit. The plot was generally fine, but unplausible things happen. I'm sorry, but people do NOT meet the new nursing aide caring for one's spouse with dementia and immediately go to said aide's home for dinner that same night. That plot point irked me even further because the aide is trans, and it felt gratuitous -- like, we have alllllll these characters, gotta get a trans person in there! And let's make her husband Black! Just...no. NO.
Also, the synopsis refers to "the voices of opposition grow[ing] louder" in response to the women's project and how "these intrepid women will have to decide how hard they're willing to fight for this book and the powerful stories within." Yeah, not so much. This occurs fairly late in the novel and is a bit of a whomp whomp.
So, bottom line: I liked the premise. It met my expectations as a light read. I even liked most of the characters. But too many flaws for me to rate this higher than 2 stars.
Life B: Overcoming Double Depression by Bethanne Patrick (Counterpoint, 2023, 208 pages)
May was Mental Health Awareness Month and this was my selection for the Mental Health May Readathon over on BookTube.
I'm a bit conflicted on this memoir. First and foremost, I want to acknowledge how incredibly brave and courageous Bethanne Patrick is to share her very personal story about being diagnosed, at 52, with double depression. If you, like me, haven't heard of the term before, the commonly held definition is that it's a combination of PDD (Persistent Depressive Disorder), a chronic depression that's present all the time, and MDD (Major Depressive Disorder), known as clinical depression resulting from a significant event (or events.)
Hence, double depression.
In her memoir, Bethanne writes about the various mental illnesses present throughout her immediate family of origin, particularly with her grandmothers, and the impact this legacy had on her formidable years. After getting married right after graduating from Smith College, she struggles to adjust as a young military spouse overseas. She is frustrated about the difficulties in establishing a writing career (more on this in a moment) and the sacrifices, including a dozen moves, she's made for her husband.
Bethanne's accounts of her challenging relationships with her two daughters make for some of the most heartbreaking passages in the book. (In one scene, her daughter Martha confronts her by saying she "never did anything" for her. "You didn't cook. You never did the laundry. You didn't come to any of my soccer games. When my friends came over you were always in bed.")
All of this is a lot. From having a front-row seat to several loved ones' lifelong battles with depression and anxiety, I can certainly empathize with and understand how the intersection of genetics and life's circumstances ultimately led to the double depression diagnosis.
But I want to address three issues that made this a 3-star read for me.
1) A recurrent theme and source of frustration to Bethanne is her difficulty in establishing a writing career. I'm not a military spouse, but I know from others who have been that it's extremely difficult to sustain a career when your life consists of frequent moves.
I was eager to read this book because Bethanne Patrick has been a presence in the book world for many years. I remember being at a book event (maybe the Book Blogger Convention in 2010?) and listening to her on a panel, and thinking how accomplished she was as a writer, reviewer, and critic. She was a big part of Twitter and for all I know she still may be (I deleted my account last fall). There, she created the viral hashtag #FridayReads. A quick search here on Goodreads shows that she has written or contributed to 10 books.
So it was a little surprising to find zero mention of any of this. There's somewhat of an explanation in the acknowledgements: Bethanne mentions that she and her agent amicably parted ways because of her decision not to include "a story" about her work in publishing. I respect that decision, but I wish I understood more of why it wasn't included. I think this would have been a stronger memoir if there was some discussion of how she was able to create what is clearly a successful career and to take pride and ownership in doing so. To me, this was a glaring omission.
2) Related to the above, I felt that the memoir underdelivered on the subtitle. I wanted to understand a bit more about the specific ways she overcame double depression, and I'd have to assume that her work as a freelance writer, reviewer, critic, and podcaster was and still is part of that. There's some discussion about practicing yoga (she's a fan) and medication, but it felt a bit glossed over and commonplace. I also wanted a deeper dive into the Life B analogy, or an extension of it, somehow, beyond this:
"Two weeks later, after dutifully downing a green-and-white capsule daily with my coffee, I woke up and knew something had shifted. It was as distinct as the moment when the optometrist clicks two lenses into place and you can suddenly read everything on your chart. 'Which is better?' says the optometrist. 'A or B' If she took one of those lenses away, I would have Life A. Life A is blurry, fuzzy, difficult to decipher. When she puts it back into place, I have Life B. Life B is clear, sharp, delineated. I chose Life B. In Life B, someone identified what was wrong inside me and had the tools necessary to fix it. I didn't think, then, of all of the things medicine cannot fix."
3) There was something about the writing style that didn't work for me. It's clunky in parts (the above quoted passage is an example), there are several incorrect usages of semicolons, and the narrative had abrupt transitions and time jumps. It felt like I was reading someone's journal. It felt like it needed at least another round of edits.
I don't mean to be harsh or do this memoir a disservice or minimize everything that the author went through. Although this didn't quite work for me, I admire her for writing about a condition that, even in 2023, still holds considerable stigma.
Hope your May was a good one and I’ll talk to you again soon.
Your book reviews are great, as usual. Thanks for sharing.