Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

This was one of those weird books where I couldn’t really decide if I loved or hated it. I still haven’t quite figured that out!

On one level, this is clearly an incredible work of art. Groff is simply of the best contemporary writers of literary fiction–her prose is stunning, her metaphors and descriptions so carefully crafted and lovingly teased out that it’s a little mind-boggling. She’s one of the authors whose turns of phrases you’re kicking yourself for not having come up with yourself, but so original that you know you probably never could have thought of them anyway. This is a book that would require several re-readings to fully grasp every phrase, every nuance, every detail. There’s a lot to parse through, so much so that reading this became almost intoxicating, overwhelming with the sheer vastness of her linguistic gifts. Groff knows how to put together a sentence, and though her skills have always been evident in her other books, this novel is truly a masterpiece.

Such beautiful writing is important here, because the plot, and the characters, represent a form of ugliness that’s a little hard to comprehend. It’s a really interesting juxtaposition, a feeling of being captivated by her words but repelled by the story she’s telling. I’m not opposed to unlikable protagonists; I would say most of my favorite characters in literature are the misanthropes, the creeps, the selfish and ambitious. But there was something about Groff’s characterization (virtually across the board) that got under my skin in a way I didn’t really like. Maybe it was that she seems to revel in the grotesque, keeping her characters just this side of realistic to make them seem a little larger-than-life, people still recognizable as humans, but distorted until they’re not quite real. There was a bizarre fairy-tale quality here, a sense that this could never really happen, but her observations about people and relationships are so spot-on at times that it hits a little too close for comfort.

Fates and Furies plays on the concept of the unreliable narrator, by presenting two sides to one marriage, that of Lotto and Mathilde. They’re an odd, magnetic couple, married within weeks of meeting; Lotto is destined for greatness, and Mathilde is the angel by his side. They’re fascinating characters, but both utterly loathsome, and again, everything they did was tinged, at least for me, with the thought that “real people don’t act this way.” I think part of my problem was that I couldn’t understand what, ultimately, Groff was trying to say. She spends the whole second half of the book tearing apart everything the reader has come to believe in the first half, and it left me feeling like I didn’t understand the point. I couldn’t decide what to make of Lotto/Mathilde, whether they were truly a grand love story that transcended the the lies and the omissions, or whether it was a sham, a fake relationship built on a foundation of untruths. Part of that may have been that it was never clear to me why they’d love one another, beyond their sexual chemistry–it seemed like a pair of narcissists in love with reflections of themselves, or skewed perceptions of the person they each want their partner to be. Maybe that’s the point–it was hard to sympathize with or understand either side, because each felt like a perception rather than a fully human being. As I think about it more, it’s clear that we only really know the characters in relation to one another, that both their lives are only moments leading up to, and away from, their marriage. And that’s where I wonder what Groff was going for, if this singular focus on their union, this unbreakable bond between two unlikely people, was meant to be real love.

This book reminded me a little bit of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom–dissecting perfection to take an unpleasant look at the truths we may know about but choose not to talk about. It makes for an uncomfortable, often unpleasant read, and left me, at least, with a weird sense of depression and an ache in my stomach. Objectively, yes, this is a very good book; it’s just not necessarily the type of book that is fun to read. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, and for me that can changed based on the day or my mood. I can sometimes handle the disturbing, the weird, the uncomfortable, but I just happened to read this during one of the times when I could have used some levity, and that skews my perception of it. I just wish there’d been a glimpse of light, a sliver of hope to cut through the unrelenting bleakness–that might have been the thing to push me firmly into “loving this book” territory. But this was a book about bad people doing bad things and living out a bad relationship, and its dark worldview was just a little too much for me.

Ultimately, this is a really interesting book, and certainly one of the better ones I’ve read in a while. I would recommend it as a work of art, a case study in superb modern writing, a book from one of our best contemporary novelists (this has been nominated for the Mann Booker prize, and is getting a lot of buzz, deservedly so). It’s an intense read, but a captivating one, and it absolutely deserves to be picked up–just make sure you have a palate cleanser to consume afterwards to remind you that the world is actually an okay place.

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Eleanor and Park and Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Reading Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park was like a punch to the gut. The only other time I’ve had that experience while reading a book was when I read Why We Broke Up a couple of years ago–they’re both books that make you so nostalgic that you’re almost dizzy, a heavy, heady feeling that creeps into your mind and doesn’t go away. It wasn’t the plot that resonated so much as it was the truth Rowell manages to find, that universal feeling of loving and trusting and losing and breaking for the first time.

Broadly, it’s your typical opposites attract, wrong side/right side of the tracks story: Eleanor’s a big girl with wild red hair who comes from a broken, dysfunctional family; Park is an upper-middle-class Korean boy who never does anything to rock the boat. They meet, they hate each other, they fall in love. Heartache ensues. It is a testament to Rowell’s power as a writer that she can take a story that has been told hundreds of thousands of times and make it feel new and fresh and real. Her characters are messy, their relationship is messy, and the world they live in is messy–there’s no teen-lit white-washing going on here.

And that’s what makes this so compelling: the raw truth of these characters and their interactions. There’s plots relating to both families, and people at school, but the bulk of the book–and the heart of it–belongs to Eleanor and Park. They’re so wrapped up in each other and you’re so wrapped up in them that you start to forget who’s who, what’s what, whether you’re reading their story or just remembering your own high school romance. It’s tender and sweet, but it’s also real. So many YA romances are filled with soap opera-worthy drama or sparkly fairy-tale happy endings, and this was one of those rare books that isn’t. Rowell knows, and conveys, that teen romances feel like forever, but aren’t–or maybe they are, but only someday. The things bringing Eleanor and Park together and keeping them apart aren’t loud and shiny; it’s just life, life happening around them, unfairly or not. I sped through this book, so emotionally invested that I honestly couldn’t put it down. When I finished, I felt like I’d just gone through a breakup, stunned and cotton-mouthed and weepy-eyed. I was, in short, a mess.

After I recovered, I immediately sought out more of Rowell’s work. After a few weeks on the waitlist at the library, I picked up a copy of Fangirl. And from pretty much the first page, I was disappointed. I will admit that my experience was certainly colored by the fact that my expectations were so, so high, and maybe if I’d read Fangirl first I’d have liked it more. But it just felt…watered down.

Fangirl is about Cath, a Nebraskan girl heading to college. She’s not excited about it, especially since her twin sister, Wren, decided they shouldn’t live together, and isn’t interested in writing their shared fan-fiction anymore, about a series that is a thinly-veiled stand-in for Harry Potter, called Simon Snow. Once at school, she has to learn to deal with her changing relationship with her sister, her complicated parents, and falling in love for the first time.

Cath was just a really hard character to root for–she was boring and judgmental and immature and self-righteous, and I just couldn’t force myself to be invested in any aspect of her story. It seemed like Rowell was trying to recapture the magic that was Eleanor–a flawed character, kind of nerdy, with a bad family life, but ultimately someone you could care for–and fell flat. Cath didn’t have enough spirit or depth to keep her interesting. This was problematic when it came to the romantic aspects of the novel, because it never made sense to me why the love interest (who I won’t name for the sake of spoilers, although it’s telegraphed from the first few pages who it’s going to be) would like her so much. I actually enjoyed him as a character, for the most part, although he didn’t feel grounded in reality–he was like a teenager’s dream of what the ideal boyfriend would be like.

One of the other things that really bothered me about this book was the use of excerpts from Cath’s fan fiction, which were included at the beginning of every chapter (and sometimes interspersed throughout). Maybe I just don’t get fan fiction, but it really annoyed me, and for all that Cath was supposed to be the best fan-fic writer that ever lived, it wasn’t very well-written. About halfway through, I began skipping those sections, which made it a little more enjoyable for me.

Okay, so I did like some things. I thought the relationship between Cath and Wren was really well-done, and I thought that made for an interesting story–twins figuring out what it means to be an individual, and to lead separate lives. I almost would have rather seen the whole book from Wren’s perspective, because I thought she was more interesting. I also think that Cath’s family problems were compelling, and Rowell handled them beautifully. And like in Eleanor and Park, Rowell sure does know how to write realistic, romantic but not over-the-top, young love scenes. (With the exception of one notable scene, easily one of the most cringeworthy I’ve ever read, in which the love interest asks Cath to read her fan-fic aloud in order to get in the mood so they can hook up. Ick!)

Actually, now that I think about it, if the fan-fic element hadn’t been included at all, and Cath was just a shy and nerdy girl, I would have liked this book so much more. Unfortunately, given that it’s straight-up called Fangirl, it just wasn’t meant to be. And I’ve also heard that Rowell is actually writing the Simon Snow books that the Fangirl fan-fiction was based on, which is just way too meta for me, and disappointing, because I’d rather she focus her efforts on something more interesting. Because those books really already exist–they’re called Harry Potter, and they’re really good.

A Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Woman must come of age by herself…
She must find her true center alone.”

That’s the pervading message of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s classic book: a woman must find herself, define herself, in the crowded chaos of daily life. A Gift From the Sea is a meditation on life, on love, on relationships, on parenthood, but above all it’s about what it means to be a woman. Lindbergh draws inspiration from two weeks spent alone at the beach, in a simple, run-down cottage that she’s rented to reconnect with herself. Leaving her husband and children and day-to-day responsibilities behind, she embraces her new-found solitude, using the time to reflect and write. The book is, in addition to being a treatise on modern-day womanhood (albeit a 1950s-era version), a love letter to the cleansing and healing power of the sea, the sand, the ocean air. The ocean and its treasures, lessons and wisdom serve to frame her reflections–each chapter uses a different type of shell as a metaphor for the things Lindbergh is talking about, and she often finds inspiration in the things she sees each day.

I was given this book at a very timely moment in my life: my college graduation party. A close family friend gave it to me, and that couldn’t be more fitting: I’ve known her since I was two, and she is, as a result, one of the most influential women in my life. It took me a while to pick it up, though, and I can’t really figure out why (that’s a lie, actually–my never-ending pile/list of “to-reads” is the reason). I firmly believe in books coming to you when you’re ready for them, and I’m not sure I was in the right frame of mind in my chaotic post-college daze to appreciate the wisdom this book offers. Now, over two years later, Lindbergh’s struggles to find balance, independence, and strength as a woman amidst the business of day-to-day life is something I can identify with much more strongly. It also helps that my relationship with my boyfriend has grown and changed dramatically in that time, and so the emphasis on what it means to be a true partner in a mature and stable relationship resonates in a way that I don’t think it would have two years ago.

All that being said, it’s truly remarkable to me that a book written in the 1950’s as a treatise on womanhood could be so relevant six decades later. There were, as is to be expected, a few moments where I was reminded of the limitations Lindbergh and other woman of the era faced (she makes it clear that most women, especially of her social class, were housewives, with few professional opportunities), but on the whole, the message of the book transcends any single time period. I loved that, and it made me feel a comforting sense of connection to Lindbergh, to her contemporaries, to my mother and the family friend who gave me the book (they both read it when they were around my age), to my grandmother (who Lindbergh reminded me of), to all of the other women struggling to define themselves, to express themselves, to be who they were meant to be. I don’t often write in my books, just because defacing that creamy-white paper feels like a sin somehow, but I broke my rule for this one, underlining and starring passages all over the place. This book feels like a mantra, and it’s one of those very few that I knew, as soon as it was over, that I’d be revisiting time and time again for the rest of my life. I look forward to picking it up in a year, or ten, or fifty, and seeing the notes I scribbled to myself when I was just twenty-four and figuring it all out, re-reading Lindbergh’s words and finding new meaning in them.

It’s rare that a book affects me on such a profound level, makes me think and inspires me to strive for the things that I want while reassuring me that it’s possible to do so, even with a family and friends and daily obligations. A Gift From the Sea should be required reading for all women, of all ages, because it just says it all in a way I’ve never quite seen before.

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

Allie Brosh is something of a personal hero(ine) of mine. I don’t remember how I came across her blog, but I do remember that the first time I visited it, I spent the next few hours reading her entire archive of posts, actually laughing out loud. Her blog (and the resulting book) is sort of a memoir–she’s a bit like David Sedaris, in that her stories are based in reality but clearly exaggerated and adjusted to maximize humor–and sort of an assortment of ramblings on random topics. Mostly, it’s made up of illustrated stories about her two dogs, her childhood escapades, and, especially recently (and most poignantly), her struggles with anxiety and depression.

First of all, I dare you to read one of the pieces in the book and not laugh, or at least crack a smile. It’s fundamentally impossible. Brosh is just flat-out hilarious, and this book was so much fun to read. There’s just something about the amateurish MS-Paint drawings combined with her self-deprecating and slightly sarcastic humor that just kills me, and I don’t remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book. As a fan of the blog, I was happy to see some of her classic pieces included (the birthday cake story is one of my favorites), and loved seeing some new ones, too (the pinecone hunting incident is hilarious). She manages to keep the humor consistent throughout, which I appreciated, although I don’t necessarily recommend reading straight-through like I did. Her humor is more effective in smaller doses, I think, and I’m going to have to revisit some of the pieces towards the end to fully appreciate them.

The two true stand-outs of the collection, though, are two pieces (well, technically three–one’s a two-parter) that deal with Brosh’s experiences with mental illness. You wouldn’t expect (or I didn’t, at least) for some of the most accurate, uncomfortably true-to-life depictions of living with depression to come from a cartoon. And yet that’s what Brosh has created–it’s still funny, in that awkward way when you’re recognizing yourself in what you’re reading, but it’s powerful in its honesty. Depression is generally, in my experience anyway, glossed over or dramatized to a degree that most people can’t relate to. But what Brosh portrays is the depression that feels a whole lot more real, the kind you’re almost slightly embarrassed by, because surely it could be worse. Hers (and mine, and I suspect a lot of peoples’) is not really something that feels newsworthy, or worthy of being covered in a book or a movie. It feels like something that needs to be sucked up and dealt with, or ignored, or something to be played down. And that’s one of the things I love most about Hyperbole–it’s bringing attention to the fact that depression is depression and just because one person’s might be a lot more visible, or a lot closer to what people imagine when they think of the word, doesn’t discount another person’s experience with the same illness. But despite the serious and important subject matter, Brosh is never preachy, and never gets into after school special territory, and, most importantly, never stops being funny. And that’s how I know Brosh is the real deal, and shouldn’t be discounted just because her medium is a little bit different from what’s considered the norm.

If you’re a tried-and-true Hyperbole fan, this is well worth the money to own. I would have perhaps liked more new content, but I’m also happy to have my favorite pieces from the blog in book form. If you’ve never read anything by Brosh before, this is a great place to start–and once you’re done, go check out her archives.

The Virgins: A Novel by Pamela Erens

The Virgins is narrated by Bruce Bennett-Jones, a senior at an exclusive New England prep school. He’s obsessed with Aviva, a beautiful and mysterious new girl, who arrives at school and, after a disastrous sexual encounter with Bruce, begins dating Seung, a star student and athlete with a drug habit. Through Bruce’s eyes and imagination, we follow their (presumably) highly sexual relationship and eventual descent into misery.

I’m not dedicating more space to explaining this book because I really, really disliked it. I was actually sort of shocked at how much I hated it–it had generally great reviews and seemed like the type of novel I’d enjoy. But man, I had to force myself to get through it.

The closest book I can compare this to is The Virgin Suicides, which is unfortunate, because this is a pale, pale imitator of an incredible novel. Just as in The Virgin Suicides, The Virgins (is the name a coincidence? I think perhaps not) features a voyeuristic narrator(s) obsessively fantasizing about the inner life (lives) of a gorgeous, intriguing girl(s). It worked for me in Suicides–the prose is brilliant, the anonymous narrators are human enough that they never become creepy but passive enough that they don’t sidetrack the real focus of the story, and the subject of their obsession, the Lisbon girls, were fully-fleshed out, ethereal, and completely worthy of the attention they were given. In the case of Erens’ novel, the narrator is a straight-up asshole, taking the mostly innocent fascination of the Suicides’ narrators and turning it into something weirdly possessive and grossly sexual, and Aviva is just kind of boring. Part of the magic of Suicides was that we were in on the secret, as readers–we were a part of the voyeurism, as in love with the Lisbons as the boys were. I never felt that in The Virgins.

Writing a book with an unreliable narrator is tricky, especially when that narrator isn’t someone you can really root for. There needs to be some balance, some grounding in reality, and I felt like that escaped Erens quite a bit. Bruce, as a character and as a narrator, disappears frequently from the narrative, and it made me forget what I was “seeing” was all in his mind. That’s sort of the point, obviously, but it’s frustrating to have 90% of a book be completely staged in one character’s imagination. The pieces of reality were few and far between, and I couldn’t really get why Bruce would be so obsessed with Seung and Aviva. That element of mystery, of their perceived sexuality, only carries so far–the level of recreation Bruce got to was unrealistic and never fully explained. Bruce is no Humber Humbert, the epitome of a depraved, unlikeable, and highly unreliable narrator who was nonetheless infused with humanity and, most importantly, a sense of justification for his actions and thoughts. Bruce just seems to be a pawn of the author to advance a plot–he doesn’t show us why he does and thinks the things he does.

The other thing that really bothered me, and this is fairly minor but still worth mentioning, is that this book was supposed to take place in the 1970s, a fact which completely escaped me until I read it in a summary of the book on Goodreads. This just enforces my point that Erens doesn’t have enough control over her writing–the story could truly have taken place at any point in the last 40 years, and the fact that I assumed (and didn’t see anything to disprove) that it took place in contemporary times isn’t a great sign. There should be a point in having a story take place in a specific time period like that, and there should be fairly clear markers of that period throughout. Again, it’s not a huge thing, but it drove me a little crazy.

Anyway, I will say that Erens’ prose has a lovely, dreamy quality that’s certainly pleasant to read. It’s just that the writing doesn’t compensate for the lack of an engaging plot, and can’t sustain 120+ pages of what is essentially pointless drivel. I don’t recommend reading this at all–try The Virgin Suicides instead. Eugenides did it first, and did it infinitely better.

A New Approach

It’s been a while since my last post–and I can explain why!

After successfully completing my challenge to read 52 books in a year (I ended up at 62, I believe), I set out to do another challenge in 2014. I felt burnt out though, and although I’m certainly still reading the same amount, and would probably be close to the same number this year, the process of keeping track of each book, then reviewing it, began to wear on me. I read because I love reading, and although the 2013 challenge was fun, I didn’t like the pressure I felt to read faster, to forgo my New Yorkers and online longreads because they didn’t count towards my quota. I also disliked writing reviews for every book, because frankly, not every book deserves the time and creative energy it takes to write a good review. I’ll be the first to admit that I mix in some junky mysteries and chick lit with my “real” books, the ones that I actually enjoy reviewing, and those are just too fluffy and simple for me to be able to say anything of substance about them.

So I gave it all up, and decided to get back to where I used to be–reading because I want to, reading what I want to, reading for the pleasure of it. I have no idea how many books I’ve read this year, and I’m okay with that.

I do, however, miss writing reviews. I tend to take an all-or-nothing approach to things like this, because I like to do things right, but it dawned on me that no one ever said that this blog had to be dedicated to reading challenges. I can simply review what I like (or dislike–mainly, what I have things to say about).

So I won’t be posting about all the books I read anymore. Just the ones that stand out.

Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

I am an unabashed David Sedaris fan. He knows what he’s good at and does it well, and although he’s often criticized within the literary community for passing off what is clearly humor writing as nonfiction/memoir (which I agree with), I think that he’s one of the funniest writers out there, and I never fail to be amused by him. I’ve read most of his books and many of the essays he’s published in magazines like The New Yorker, and I find that he really excels at balancing poignancy and hilarity– there’s always a heart and a sense of reality in all that he writes.

If you’ve read anything else by Sedaris, you’ll know what to expect with this collection–a series of essays on current events, his childhood, his travels abroad, and his crazy family, all infused with his signature deprecating, deadpan humor. He mostly delivers, and this collection is reliably entertaining, although I felt like it didn’t quite live up to the non-stop hilarity of some of his previous collections. Contributing to this might have been the fact that, as this collection was published five years after his last book, it seemed like a lot of the pieces had appeared elsewhere before being included, so I felt like I’d read most of them (and they happened to be some of the best ones). I also wasn’t a fan of the short stories interspersed throughout, which I didn’t think were that interesting or funny, and seemed really out of place.

Collections like Me Talk Pretty One Day had me crying of laughter from start to finish, and this one seemed a bit more cynical and snarky, and slightly less funny. It was still good, don’t get me wrong, and if you’re a Sedaris fan it’s absolutely worth picking up, as some of the essays are true gems. I loved “Understanding Understanding Owls” and “Loggerheads,” among many others. But it’s definitely not the place to start in his body of work.

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews

I’m honestly shocked that I never read Flowers in the Attic when I was younger. I illicitly read smutty books like it was my job back then, mostly because I was reading far above my age level from very early on and I had a house overflowing with grown-up books just waiting to be perused. I have vivid memories of dog-earing the pages of my mother’s copy of The Mists of Avalon to mark the sexy parts, for example (I’ve still never read the whole book), and was fascinated by the sex scenes I came across in unexpected places. There’s definitely a thrill to sneakily reading “bad” books–it’s exciting and terrifying, the prospect of being caught absolutely mortifying. My cousin and I, when we were twelve, bought a copy of Judy Blume’s Forever… and spent weeks obsessively re-reading it until we were so afraid of one of our mothers finding it that we put it in the library’s return chute and ran away. Needless to say, Flowers in the Attic would have been my jam back then. 

As a twenty-four year old, though? Not so much. I finally got around to reading it in preparation for the Lifetime movie adaptation, just so I’d be up on what all the hype was all about, and because I have a weird thing about having to read the book before I see the movie. I obviously wasn’t expecting highbrow literature–my expectations were really low, in fact–but I was still pretty disappointed.

If you don’t know the basic premise of the novel, here’s a quick summary: It’s the late 1950’s, and Cathy Dollanganger has the perfect life–that is, until her father dies unexpectedly in a car crash, leaving the family penniless. Her flighty mother decides to move the family to live with her estranged parents, promising a life of riches and fun, but when they arrive, the children (Cathy, her older brother Christopher, and the four-year-old twins) learn that they will be living in the attic, and no one, apart from their evil grandmother, will know that they even exist. Cathy and Chris become de facto parents to their young siblings as time passes, trying to figure out how to survive…and deal with their blooming hormones and changing bodies (hint, hint). 

This is definitely not intended to be anything other than trashy fun, but it was so poorly written that I couldn’t even enjoy it as that. V.C. Andrews spends so much time describing random and irrelevant things, which really slows down the pace and makes it a chore to read. The scandalous, campy parts are still sort of fun, in their own way, but I found them to be greatly exaggerated and, again, didn’t think that the dozens of pointless, boring passages in between those good parts were worth enduring to get to them. The dialogue is stilted and often anachronistic, the characters are annoying, and it was all just sort of a slog to read. I want my campy trash to be fun to read–if I’m going to spend that valuable reading time on something fluffy and frivolous, it at least needs to be enjoyable. This definitely wasn’t. 

Again, if I’d read it as a kid, I’d have loved it. But as an adult with more discerning tastes, and with so many other books out there to read, this one is just not worth the time. Read the Wikipedia page to get a sense of what it’s about, if you’re curious, but there’s no point in reading it. 

 

CBR-V Wrap-Up

I set out to read 52 books in 2013. I ended up reading 65, which averages out to 1.25 books a week!

I read some truly great books this year, and some okay-to-bad books. In no particular order, here’s my list of top 3 bests and worsts. This is by no means a definitive list–there were dozens of others that could have made my best list alone.

Best:

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood 

Worst:

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

Divergent by Veronica Roth

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta 

CBR-V Review #65: The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith

I am, unabashedly, a J.K. Rowling fangirl. I grew up with Harry Potter and my devotion the series has only deepened over time, and in my eyes, Rowling can do no wrong. Although I still haven’t gotten around to reading A Casual Vacancy yet, I most certainly will at some point. However, given the mixed reviews of her first foray into adult literature, I’m glad that The Cuckoo’s Calling (written under a pseudonym) was my first exposure to her non-Harry Potter work.

I do want to say that I think I would have loved this book even if it hadn’t been written by Rowling. I might not have ever had the opportunity to pick it up, given that it wasn’t hugely successful before the reveal of its author’s true identity, but I would have definitely still liked it. And if I hadn’t liked it, I wouldn’t have given it a strong review just because of who the author is (as much as I adore her).

The Cuckoo’s Calling is an old-school detective novel, featuring the hardened-yet-lovable protagonist of Cormoran Strike, a former soldier in the British army and a current private eye, struggling to make ends meet and dealing with a recent breakup with his beautiful ex-girlfriend. He’s approached by a wealthy lawyer who wants Strike to investigate the suspicious death (deemed a suicide by the police) of his sister, a beautiful and famous model named Lula Landry. With his new assistant, Robin (a practical young woman caught up in the excitement of detective work), in tow, Strike sets out to find out what really happened to Lula.

I could not stop reading this book. It was just so, so good.

I appreciated, first and foremost, that this was simply a really good mystery. Nowadays, I feel like a lot of mysteries are closer to the horror and/or psychological thriller genres, which can be good, but aren’t my favorite. What can I say–I’m a scaredy-cat. This was just a fun read, with nothing too grim or disturbing to weigh down the enjoyment of figuring out whodunnit. It’s a lot like an Agatha Christie mystery, complete with the dramatic, chapter-long monologue at the end revealing who the culprit of the crime is, and I loved that.

In that same vein, Rowling keeps the tone light and the prose fast-paced. This is where her years of Harry Potter experience really benefited her, because she was really able to use her (underrated, in my opinion) knack for humor here, while also keeping things moving and giving the reader some exciting action and a twisty, unpredictable mystery (along with the requisite red herrings, which were convincing and deployed well).

Rowling is also so good at creating unique and memorable characters, as evidenced by the amazing cast of the Harry Potter series. She lives up to that reputation here. Not only is Cormoran Strike a perfect protagonist (something of an anti-hero, complex, with a good backstory), but her supporting characters are brilliant as well. Robin is a great foil to Strike–somewhat naïve, but smart and capable too–and the people they encounter throughout the investigation are just so well-rendered and so believable that they practically jump off the page. She also doesn’t disappoint with her creative names, which were one of my favorite things about the HP series–we’ve got Lula Landry (a superstar name if I’ve ever heard one), Guy Sommé (a flamboyant fashion designer), Deeby Macc (a popular rap star), and Tansy Bestigui (a young and obscenely wealthy housewife), just to name a few.

I’m pretty sure this is going to become a series (I’d be disappointed if it didn’t), which makes a lot of sense. There’s a lot more to discover about Strike, I think, and I’m excited to see where his relationship with Robin goes (and what mysteries come next). Given how good this book is, it seems like Rowling may have struck gold twice in terms of successful series.

I really don’t have anything bad to say about this novel. With it, Rowling has proved that she’s not just a kid’s writer, and can hold her own as a writer of adult fiction as well.