This is a great book. Fantastic story, excellent character development, and vivid writing that didn’t feel forced. It’s what I want a book to be, frankly.

Kate Crane is a professional dancer with an NYC ballet company. Her younger sister has just had to leave the company temporarily, and Kate is dealing with her feelings about this. The book touches on some pretty universal themes, including mental illness, loneliness, and the desire for perfection. But it does it all set against the background of this elite world. It could have gone the ‘oh, poor little gifted princess’ route so easily, but Meg Howrey instead provides us with a very real, stripped down look at the decidedly unglamorous world of professional dance.

You don’t need to know anything about ballet to enjoy this book, but you probably should have some respect for and interest in it. The narrator Kate speaks directly to the reader, telling us the story, jumping around a bit from anecdotes to the here and now. She talks about growing up with her sister, being apart from her, the challenges of making it in this profession. She also takes us through a couple of ballets, describing how they should be danced, what they are trying to show, really bringing us along to the point where we can almost hear the music.

And while it is a book about a ballet dancer, it isn’t about close-up shots of dancers’ destroyed feet, or stereotypes of disorder-eating prima donnas (I’m looking at you, Center Stage). It’s about a young woman who may be peaking and heading down in her career. It’s about family relationships and dealing with mental health. It’s about friendships, what we choose to reveal about ourselves to our families and to others. How we all try to make it through, and what ‘make it through’ even means.

That sounds little deep, but it’s not an especially heavy book. There are certainly mature themes, and some fairly vivid language. Even though I’m not gifted in my field, nor am I a (current or former) dancer, and am about a decade older than the narrator, I related to her experiences.

I waver between giving this four and five stars but settle at four because the ending, while not entirely tacked on, did sort of come out of nowhere for me. If I were to read it again it might fit better with the overall theme, but because of that I’ll go with four stars and hope you’ll still add it to your list.

This is an interesting novel, just released last month. It’s one I would recommend for those looking for a book with a little bit of mystery, a lot of character study (can we really judge ourselves accurately?) and some vivid scenery. Suggested to me by the same person who offered up ‘Defending Jacob,’ it tells the story from the perspective of Hilda Good, a divorced real estate agent in her late 50s/early 60s who still lives in the Massachusetts seaside town where she grew up. She has a bit of a drinking problem (the size of which is debated throughout the book) and not a lot of friends.

The book follows Hildy over the course of a very eventful year as she befriends a new town resident, becomes privy to some secrets perhaps she should not, and rediscovers (in various different ways) friends from her youth. Hildy is the type of character who is flawed and you see it. She isn’t hateful, or horrible; she’s just not perfect. I don’t have any experience with alcoholic parents, so I can’t say whether the depiction of her and her family would ring true to someone who does, but it did not seem cartoonish to me. Instead, the writing portrays a woman who thinks she knows her limits but may be quite close to pushing them further than she can handle.

The pacing of the book felt a little off, but I do wonder if part of that is due to reading it on an e-reader. I know it sounds odd, but even though there’s a little percentage complete box at the bottom of the screen, I have a much harder time putting that into perspective as compared to when I’m holding a physical book in my hand. My brain has spent over 30 years expecting books to flow in a certain manner relative to the amount remaining; with an e-reader those cues are gone. It did at times feel like a lot of ‘nothing’ was happening, but I never had to struggle to pick it up, finishing it in about three days, and am still able to picture the town, the houses, and all of the characters quite vividly.

I’d say this is a great little read for a weekend spent somewhere chilly. Add it to your mid-October reading list, warm up some cider and let yourself spend some time in New England.

In my quest to read more fiction as part of this Cannonball Read, I’ve been soliciting recommendations. Some (Gone Girl) seem to roll off of everyone’s tongues. Others, like this one, I’d never heard of and am bummed I didn’t read sooner. It was one of those books that taunted me when it was sitting in my purse during the work day. I read it on the walk to work and the walk home. I chose to read it over watching mindless TV after a long day at work (a rare occurrence for me), and even balanced it on the shelves so I could keep reading it while I brushed my teeth at night. I was engrossed. I have one or two little issues, although even as I write them I realize that they do work pretty well within the book.

Defending Jacob is another first-person narrative, this time told using a flashback device that actually works and really weaves together a tight and interesting book. The narrator is Adam Barber, an assistant DA who prosecutes homicides among other crimes. The flashback device used is Adam testifying at a grand jury hearing set a year or so after the main events of the book. It isn’t discussed in every chapter, but helps frame some parts of the discussion, introducing new components of the story. The homicide in this book is an eighth grade boy found dead in a park on weekday morning. Adam has a son, Jacob, in the same class and after a few days it becomes apparent that Jacob is the main suspect.

The book examines many different components of the issue of facing the possibility that one’s child killed another. It’s not a plea to sympathize with the parents of accused murderers; it’s an exploration of what it must be like, both to see one’s son facing such charges and wondering (or perhaps not wondering) somewhere deep inside if he did it. Does a good parent even entertain the notion? MUST a good parent entertain the notion? What is owed to the child? To society? To one’s spouse? Is the priority the child, and to hell with the marriage? Can a marriage survive that? And what happens to the family, regardless of the guilt of the accused, during and after the trial?

These themes are explored in pretty fantastic detail. While Adam gives us the perspective, because he tells the story as a retrospective, he’s able to lend clarity to what at the time may have seemed muddy or incomprehensible. He and his wife handle their son’s situation very differently, and while the author gets very close to some stereotypes of the dad vs. mom roles, he also builds them out as based more in the character of the individuals. Meaning, yes, the mother seems more emotive than the father, but the father is also a DA. Frankly, I think it would have been an even better, more interesting book if the mother were the DA and the father were a former teacher. Play around a little bit with the gendered expectations.

There are some surprises in the book, but none that come totally out of left field. It’s not predictable but it makes sense, which I think is such a great quality, and hard to come by. I like authors to avoid Deus ex Machina – it’s lazy and frustrating. But come on – we also want a little surprise in our books, right? Landay does it really well.

What most impressed me about the book is that it took a premise – the murder of a 14-year-old-boy – and kept that premise right in the middle while not making it the focus of the book. I wouldn’t describe it as a crime novel, or a thriller, but a book about a family in a very, very difficult situation.

Pick it up. It’s a good read and worth your time.

I tend to gravitate towards non-fiction books. Reading literature in school involved so much analysis; I got to a point after my last literature class where I felt I didn’t know how to read fiction on my own, without a guide or a discussion around it to try to find the ‘deeper’ meaning. What’s the point of picking up a classic if I’m going to miss all of the nuance?

On occasion, however, a work of fiction sounds interesting and I’m willing to give it a whirl. Generally speaking I’ve been lucky with my picks – and “Silver Linings Playbook” continues that lucky streak. If you’ve not yet read it, and can get past the idea of picturing the dude from “The Hangover” and Katniss Everdeen in the main roles, I think you’ll find you’re in for a quick but satisfying read.  I read it in three days and found I was disappointed not in the ending, but in the fact that it was done. This is a book that had me thinking about it when I wasn’t reading it, and wanting to get back to it when I was doing other things.

We meet the protagonist Pat briefly in a psychiatric facility. His perspective is the one we experience throughout the novel; it’s a first person narrative that usually works. Pat consistently refers to the facility as the ‘bad place,’ which is one of the turns of phrase author Matthew Quick uses to lead us to think that there’s something a little off about Pat. That phrase, along with Pat insisting on referring to his separation from his wife as ‘apart time,’ were really the only things about the book that consistently bothered me. I think I get what Quick was going for, but the phrases really just pulled me out of the story. Thankfully, I was able to get past that and enjoy the writing, but I do wish Quick had found another way to demonstrate the developmental pause the character seems to have taken.

Pat has been sprung from the mental health facility by his mother, who has arranged for Pat to live back home with her and her inattentive, Eagles football-obsessed husband. Pat is focused on staying in amazing physical shape and acting kindly so that he can win back his wife Nikki. Clearly we get the sense that something is wrong with his assumption that he has any chance getting back with Nikki; he even repeatedly admits to himself that he treated her poorly. However, it’s clear that there’s more to that story, and over the course of the novel we find out, for the most part, what’s really going on.

To try to help bring Pat back into the outside world, Pat’ friend Robbie reintroduces him to Tiffany, who is working through her own mental health issues. She’s a young widow who rarely speaks but, when she does, chooses the fewest words necessary to get her point across. She’s blunt, a little socially awkward, and possibly interested in Pat. Pat wants nothing to do with her but, due to some clever work on her part, is pulled into a mutually beneficial relationship.

Given their respective circumstances, it could have been so easy for the author to lead us to pity them. And perhaps some readers will feel that emotion as they get to know their stories. For me, I felt more empathy and a little bit of hope as the novel progressed. Quick does a great job of showing honest emotions without begging the reader to cry or just feel so darned sorry for them. The characters are flawed, but from my perspective they are flawed in realistic ways. They could be our friends, and that helps make the connection to their plights more real.

Finally, the book has a resolution that is incomplete, although not frustratingly so. I’m warning you now: not every storyline is wrapped up at the end. The author doesn’t end it all with a knock on a door followed by a fade to black what-will-happen-next scene (I’m looking at you, ‘Sideways,’), but he doesn’t give us an epilogue or address every relationship that has formed or broken throughout the story. I enjoy that – I don’t need a totally messy ending, but I do like one in which it is expected that the characters will still go on and have struggles to face and issues to resolve.

I’m only on book five, but so far this year this is my favorite. If I can keep finding novels like this one, I just might have to put some of the non-fiction books on my reading list on hold.