Library Haul: Reviewing New Literary Fiction First Pages Pt. 1

Sorry I've abandoned you all for the summer! I'll talk more about it in my July wrap-up, but I wanted to just put that out there. I've posted a few reviews that I've had ready to go for months when I can remember to. I've definitely dropped the ball, but thank you all for continuing to read my posts and share them with your friends through this time. I've been book blogging since 2017, so I'm trying to give myself the grace that taking breaks when I'm not feeling it is how this blog has stayed alive so long. 

Today, we're playing a new game. I'm bringing a habit I have after library trips to the blog. I find it hard to really figure out if I'm going to like the book at the library. If I have a ton of time, I'll bring a stack to the couch and read the first few pages of a book to decide if I want to take it home, but usually, I'm rushing through, tossing familiar or interesting looking books in my tote to sift through later. I'll skim the summary after a title or cover catches my eye, but that's about it. Then, I'll get home and evaluate my giant pile I'll never actually be able to read to see what I want to return the next day and what I want to squeeze into my reading agenda. I'm like a kid in a candy store at the library, so I never have enough self restraint to leave with one or two. 

I thought it would be fun to share my unfiltered process with all of you. It might be interesting in the future to write a more in-depth breakdown of my first impression of certain novel pages more from a writer perspective of seeing what works and what doesn't, but for now, I'm doing this 100% as a reader who doesn't have enough time making snap judgements, and I think that can be fun in itself. 

How many pages do you give a book before you decide it's something you want to commit to?

Tilt by Emma Pattee

Summary: Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, she realizes there’s nothing to do but walk.

Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. She’s determined to change her life if she can just make it home.

First Line: "So here we are, thirty-seven weeks pregnant, at IKEA."

Review: For one, I love a map at the start of a book, and since I stopped reading fantasy in middle school, I've been horribly deprived of that joy. So that was a nice treat. I also like the chapter heading being a time of day and that it's an Ikea in NE Portland. 

I don't love the first or second paragraph, but the third assessing the Monday shoppers at IKEA definitely has hook potential. It's also somewhat rare to find a literary adult novel written in first person (editing note: somehow I picked up almost all first person books in this haul, somewhat disproving myself). I'm not sure I love the voice yet, but there's certainly potential here. Also, I've heard it gushed about enough on the Book Riot Podcast that I'm definitely reading this one. So, despite my reservation about the book being narrated to an unborn child and general feelings about books centered on pregnancy (just not my thing), I'm going to keep this one in the stack. 

Bring The House Down by Charlotte Runcie

Summary: Alex Lyons always has his mind made up by the time the curtain comes down at a performance—the show either deserves a five-star rave or a one-star pan. Anything in between is meaningless. On the opening night of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he doesn’t deliberate over the rating for Hayley Sinclair’s show, nor does he hesitate when the opportunity presents itself to have a one-night stand with the struggling actress.

Unaware that she’s gone home with the theater critic who’s just written a career-ending review of her, Hayley wakes up at his apartment to see his scathing one-star critique in print on the kitchen table, and she’s not sure which humiliation offends her the most. So she revamps her show into a viral sensation critiquing Alex Lyons himself—entitled son of a famous actress, serial philanderer, and by all accounts a terrible man. Yet Alex remains unapologetic. As his reputation goes up in flames, he insists on telling his unvarnished version of events to his colleague, Sophie. Through her eyes, we see that the deeper she gets pulled into his downfall, the more conflicted she becomes. After all, there are always two sides to every story.

A brilliant Trojan horse of a book about art, power, misogyny, and female rage, Bring the House Down is a searing, insightful, and often hilarious debut that captures the blurred line between reality and performance.

First Line: "Alex Lyons opened his laptop and wrote the review in the space of forty-five minutes after the show ended."

Review: I love listening to the podcast Charlotte co-hosts and there's a Kiley Reid quote on the front, so I'm interested. I also have an interest in theater and criticism, so I picked up the book. This is fairly pedestrian as far as openings go. Nothing thrilling but also nothing offensive. It is interesting because the first line seems like the book will be in third person, but then an "I" mysteriously pops in. We learn in the second paragraph that this "I" is one of his coworkers at the newspaper, but as yet, it's unclear where she fits into this. I did cheat and read the third paragraph that spilled onto the third page, and there seems to be a fair amount of direct address to the reader as well. I'm intrigued to see where this balancing act is leading but also a little nervous. I'll keep it in the TBR. 

Atavists by Lydia Millet 

Summary: From Lydia Millet—“the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves” (Chicago Tribune)—comes an inventive new collection of short fiction. Atavists follows a group of families, couples, and loners in their collisions, confessions, and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big-box stores, gastropubs, college campuses, and medieval role-playing festivals.

The various “-ists” who people these linked stories—from futurists to insurrectionists to cosmetologists—include a professor who’s morbidly fixated on an old friend’s Instagram account; a woman convinced that her bright young son-in-law is watching geriatric porn; a bodybuilder who lives an incel’s fantasy life; a couple who surveil the neighbors after finding obscene notes in their mailbox; a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism; and a suburban ex-marathoner dad obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his backyard.

First Line: "She was courting her own disgust, these days."

The rest of the paragraph is too good not to give you it as well. It continues: "The way she'd picked at her knee scabs as a kid—knowing it would end in blood but doing it anyway. Revulsion was a stimulant."

Review: I had no context for this one when I picked it up, but some of the summaries of the short stories were intriguing. I liked that each story seemed to be titled for a profession. No clue what I was getting into, but genuinely, this first paragraph has taken my breath away. That's how you use language like a shard of glass, and the topic of the story has only further intrigued me as I've continued down the page. This is going straight to the top of the priority pile. 

Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan

Summary: Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn’t these be the best years of her life? Why doesn’t it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past? 

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.

First Line: "It's four A.M. and the house party hasn't thinned." 

Review: I'll admit a shameful thing. I got an ARC of this book, but my summer black hole of reading meant that it came out before I read it. So while I have it on my Kindle, I figured I'd take the finished book for a spin and finally fulfill my duty to think about this book. I do love the dramatic oil painting on the cover. 

Well, it starts on an interesting line, a setting that has my attention. The rest of the paragraph becomes a thought exercise on house parties and what become of them as you become a proper adult. Here's another first person example as well. Picked up a lot of these in this round. The writing here has that pleasing quality that does nice things for my brain. Like *oh, we're really using language thoughtfully* beyond just as a means to use a story. Why did I wait around so long to pick this one up? Shame on me. It'll go in the TBR pile right under Atavists. 

The Catch by Ursa Daley-Ward

Summary: Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life.

Clara, a celebrity author in desperate need of validation, believes Serene is their mother, while Dempsey, isolated and content to remain so, believes she is a con woman. As they clash over this stranger, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts—together. In her riveting first foray into fiction, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that Black women must make for self-actualization. The result is a marvel of a debut novel that boldly asks, “How can it ever, ever be a crime to choose yourself?”

First Line: "It is hot. Too hot for the twenty-fourth of June. (or) It's too hot. Wrong for the twenty-fourth of June. (or) It feels hot (and wrong) this twenty-fourth of June (and) how can anyone breathe right now, anyway, the world becoming what the world is becoming; the world being how the world has always been? 

Review: Okay, I know there are periods in there, but that whole piece felt like one long sentence, so I gave you all of it. I can't say I'm loving this first page. There's a scape of dialogue and then some thoughts on what was lost when this main character got veneers. I don't really get how all these things connect. Which, granted, this is just the first page. But I'm not loving this opening or the writing style so much. And sometimes when I come home with a giant stack of library books, when I have too many to ever read them all, that's how I decide what goes back. At least for now. A lot of times I'll pick up books again in a totally different headspace and take to them immediately. 

Kala by Colin Walsh

Summary: In the seaside village of Kinlough, on Ireland’s west coast, three old friends meet for the first time in years. They—Helen, Joe and Mush—were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann at its white-hot center. But later that year, Kala disappeared without a trace. Now remains have been discovered in the woods—including a skull with a Polaroid photo tucked inside—and the town is both aghast and titillated at reopening this old wound.

On the eve of this gruesome discovery, Helen had reluctantly returned for her father’s wedding, the world-famous musician Joe had come home to dry out and reconnect with something authentic, and Mush had never left, too shattered by the events of that summer to venture beyond the counter of his mother’s café. But when two more girls go missing, they are forced to confront their own complicity in the events that led to Kala’s disappearance. Ultimately, they must do what others should have done before to stop the violent patterns of their town’s past repeating themselves once again.

In cracklingly vivid prose, Kala brilliantly examines the sometimes brutal costs of belonging, as well as the battle in the human heart between vengeance and forgiveness, despair and redemption.

First Line: "We're perched on our bikes at the top of the hill."

Review: The book really opens with a character sheet almost like a play with how everyone is connected with each other. The scene is interesting, and it's written well, but there's something I'm not immediately clicking with in this book at the moment. It makes me think that this is one I'd rather read at a later time when I'm feeling it more. 

Persuasion by Jane Austen

First Line: "Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there is faculties were roused into admiration and respect by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patients; there any unwelcome sensation arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creation of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed."

Review: Okay, it feels silly to do this with Austen, but I thought it would also be an interesting exercise. Also, what a sentence. It is, somehow, still not the entire first paragraph, I will note. I read an article about Brandon Taylor talking about Persuasion, and I keep meaning to read more Austen, so I picked this one up on the off-chance I get a whim to dive into a classic sometime soon. 

All That Life Can Afford by Emily Everett

Summary: Anna first fell in love with London at her hometown library—its Jane Austen balls a far cry from her life of food stamps and hand-me-downs. But when she finally arrives after college, the real London is a moldy flat and the same paycheck-to-paycheck grind—that fairy-tale life still out of reach.

Then Anna meets the Wilders, who fly her to Saint-Tropez to tutor their teenage daughter. Swept up by the sphinxlike elder sister, Anna soon finds herself plunged into a heady whirlpool of parties and excess, a place where confidence is a birthright. There she meets two handsome young men—one who wants to whisk her into his world in a chauffeured car, the other who sees through Anna’s struggle to outrun her past. It’s like she’s stepped into the pages of a glittering new novel, but what will it cost her to play the part?

Sparkling with intelligence and insight, All That Life Can Afford peels back the glossy layers of class and privilege, exploring what it means to create a new life for yourself that still honors the one you’ve left behind.

First Line: "It was almost midnight." Here, I'll give you the second line since that didn't give much: "The water of the bay unfurled darkly far below, shimmering with white lights, each one a boat or yacht."

Review: This one's tough. It opens not at the actual start of the story but on a prologue, and I almost always find that prologues feel very forced and somewhat boring and inessential. She's at a party here. They're counting down, perhaps for New Years. Maybe I'll understand the point better later. I did skip past the prologue, and I'll give you the first sentence of chapter 1, which is the reason I kept this book when I made my last series of library returns (this was from an earlier run through the library to pick up a hold): "I'd never been a great actor of a convincing liar, and an American in Britain will always be scrutinized. I prayed the ticket inspector might thing I was an idiot, like all Americans, and not a crook, like most of the people he found on the train to Brighton without a ticket to cover the fair." Now, that's more interesting. I'm still not entirely sold on this one, and it'll probably fall near the bottom of the pile, but chapter 1 has something to it that makes me a bit curious to read this expat story.