The Defense by Steve Cavanagh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was a fast paced thriller, but I think my mind was distracted so I never properly got into it and didn’t care enough to really get engrossed in it.
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I am a big fan of Julia Alvarez and have loved several of her novels. I love her narrative style and I love her beautiful characters and this book is no exception. This is the story of Alma who is a famous author who decides to move back to her home country and create a cemetery of untold stories to honor and bury all the stories that won’t leave her alone but that she’s not managed to write. The novel intermingles Alma’s story with Filomena’s (a worker she hires to tend to her cemetery) and several of the characters also tell their stories. Each story is unique and interesting and you can’t help but get attached. IT wasn’t my favorite of Alvarez’s novels but I still loved all the moments I spent with it. with gratitude to netgalley and Algonquin Books for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review 
Here are a few other books I loved
Here are all 202 books I’ve read this year. You can see my goodreads reviews here.
“It had been almost two months and he still waited for her to walk in the back door every morning. That morning he had leaned over Ali’s bed, and when his daughter opened her eyes and he saw the look in them, he knew she did, too. They were all floating in some in-between where nothing seemed real and nothing seemed right. Waiting for the rest of life, whatever that was, a future that felt like a betrayal. He kept her phone charged.” I started this novel months and months ago because I love Anna Quindlen and I knew it would be phenomenal. But it’s about what happens to a family when the mom dies. And it was so heartbreaking that I had to put it down. For months. I picked it up and put it down many, many, many times because this year was hard enough on its own and I didn’t need to sit in more grief. I didn’t want to sit in more grief. ““Yep,” he said. Her “complicated” and his “yep” were first cousins, were two answers designed to keep the jack in the box, because who knew what might pop out, everyone has a whole universe of trouble inside and no one wants the world to know.” Finally a few days ago I was ready to tackle it and I am so glad I did. I will say that I still think it’s very, very, very sad. The grief pours out of each page. It’s heavy and hard to read. Especially because it’s not “in your face” grief. It’s not wailing. It’s the quiet, subtle grief that’s so much more heart wrenching. It’s the little moments that will never be the same. It’s the ordinary losses that feel so acute. “You know, one thing I like about Miss Cruz,” Ali said. “She never says that. It’s like she knows that time can pass, and things can get better, or things can get worse, or maybe they’ll just stay the same. People act like time will fix things so everything will be the same again, everything will be all right, but sometimes it’s the opposite. Ant can get harder and meaner until that’s the person he is, for all time.” There’s so much sadness and grief in this story. But there’s also moments of joy and hope. As with life, mostly we tend to move on, mostly we’re resilient and we recover. People help us. Kindness helps us. And we pick up our pieces and we find a way to survive and if we’re lucky we also find a way back to joy. What a beautiful story this was. As with all her stories, this will stay with me for a long time. with gratitude to netgalley and Random House for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review
“There is no such thing as a happy place. Because when you are happy, everywhere is a happy place. And when you are sad, everywhere is a sad place.” What a gift it is to read one of my favorite books for the year during the last few days of the year. This book was such a journey and so unexpected. “I think we talk about happiness all wrong. As if it’s this fixed state we’re going to reach. Like we’ll just be able to live there, forever. But that’s not my experience with happiness. For me, it comes and go. It shows up and then disappears like a bubble.” It’s the story of Phoebe who is at a particularly low moment in her life and can’t see a way out. It’s the story of Lila who is at a particularly high moment in her life about to get married. And how their lives clash and entangle in the most unexpected of ways. “They get back in the car. She wonders if her feelings for Gary could be a new form of love, one she’s never known before: love without expectation. Love that you are just happy enough to feel. Love that you don’t try to own like a painting. But she doesn’t know if that is a real thing. She hopes it is. She looks out to the side of the road, like she’s a kid going on an errand with her father, announcing whatever billboard she sees.” There are so many “life” stories in this one book. And it’s not about any one of them as much as it is about all of them. Infertility, infidelity, marriage, getting old, getting married, losing a parent, feeling lonely, death of a loved one, disappointment, loss, suicidal ideation, friendship, connection, lack of connection, art, literature, and so so much more. “It is not an easy thing to do, walk away from what you’ve built and save yourself. It is so much easier to sit in things and wait for something to save us.” At its core, it’s about what all good books are about, for me, it’s about humans trying hard to be humans in a world that’s hard, confusing, complicated and complex. It’s about trying to understand what cannot be understood. Life is not simple. Humans are not simple. We can’t even understand our own feelings let alone predict what others’ are feeling. “Because Gary is not wrong—becoming who you want to be is just like anything else. It takes practice.” I loved every one of the moments I spent with these flawed, confused characters. It all seemed real to me, and I loved the brutally honest conversations and the confused ones and the fake ones because they all seemed part of life for me, too. I just felt for all of them because I could see their struggle. Because I could see how hard it was to be a human. “She is so good at predicting what will happen in books, so bad at predicting what will happen in life. That is why she has always preferred books—because to be alive is much harder.” I cannot recommend this story enough. It was deeply moving and meaningful to me, what a gift it is to get to read stories like these. with gratitude to Henry Holt & Company and netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review
3.5 i was less engaged with this one. it was still fast paced and fun read.
Read this in one swallow and then watched the show with my husband. Nothing like a good revenge novel.
Wow this was some twisty thriller. I like Finlay’s books but this one read different for me and I really enjoyed it. There were twists and turns and unexpected alliances. This is the story of a car that’s pulled out of a lake with two dead bodies inside. The car belongs to a girl that went missing years ago. She’s not there, two others are. Who are they and how did they get in the car? and where’s the dead girl? it’s a wild ride you’re sure to enjoy. with gratitude to netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
3.5 The broken woman comes back home and runs into her childhood sweetheart. The families have not spoken and hate each other. Ring a bell? Yep, Romeo and Juliet’s story never gets old. Just gets different permutations. And this is one. Enjoyable and sweet with some tough stories in the truths of their lives.
Christina Lauren never disappoints. Even though I hadn’t read the earlier books in this series, I loved the idea of these modern retellings of fairy tales. And who doesn’t love Tangled? Written in their typical whimsical style, this is the tale of a girl who’s brought up and homeschooled away from society. When Ren goes to college for the first time, things are about to change. In ways you might predict and in ways you absolutely won’t. A light, fun read that I loved. with gratitude to netgalley and Hyperion Avenue for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review
so many people i love loved this book. I think parts of it are great and maybe it really should not be listened to on audio but I think the audio is not as good as I wish it were and parts of it really made me upset. So I am giving this a 3.5 and rounding up.
I checked out this book at least 20 times before I finally read it. I liked it fine but somehow I think small town, cozy mystery is not my thing. It was ok just not as interesting as I would have liked. I think i would have enjoyed watching this as a movie though. |
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