Little Fires Everywhere is the story of rich and poor colliding.

The Richardson family is happy and settled in Shaker Heights, America’s first planned community, where the houses follow a colour palette and the community rules ensure garbage is never in sight and noise never hits a certain level. Their three children are top in class and have strong, confident personalities.

The Warren family (Mia and her teen daughter Pearl) are basically modern-day gypsies who travel America and never stay settled for long. Mia is an artist and works odd jobs to pay for rent and food. Pearl is crackerjack smart and easily adaptable to new schools and homes. Mia and Pearl move into the Richardson’s rental duplex and quickly turn heads.

The Richardson’s are not the rich family here. They are certainly rich in terms of house and lands, but they are each limited by emotional or environmental constraints. And they are each deeply affected by the relationships they have with Mia and Pearl.

It all comes to a head when longtime friends of the Richardson’s try to adopt a Chinese-American baby who has been left at the town firehall, and the birth mother turns up to claim the baby. Class hierarchy, racism, and pro-American ideologies are brought to the forefront, which divides the Richardson family and forces Mia and Pearl to uproot again.

I found this book to be a compelling page-turner about breaking and bending the rules, and why we need to think about the identity we create for ourselves and when it’s time to let it go. Little Fires Everywhere is smart, funny, and insightful. Most of the characters are very likeable, despite how devastating the consequences of their actions are.

As the marketing copy says: ‘This enchanting tale of a cursed mythical creature and the lonely fisherman who falls in love with her is “a daring, mesmerizing novel…single-handedly bringing magic realism up-to-date” (Maggie O’Farrell, best-selling author of Hamnet).’

I really loved this book. It’s the stuff of fairy tales and Caribbean lore. In 1976, David is fishing off the island of Black Conch when he meets a mermaid named Aycayia. She is a big and powerful creature of the sea who is enamoured with his guitar playing. They meet several times in the same spot but one day David accidentally lures her into danger.

Two Americans have chartered a fishing vessel and catch Aycayia. They are thrilled with their luck and dream of the wealth they’ll have selling her to a museum.

David, under the cover of darkness, rescues Aycayia but he has another problem on his hands when she starts turning from a mermaid back into a young woman. Gossip, nosy neighbours, long-time grudges and all the vices of a small island collide with the beautiful love story between two lonely creatures.

Give it a read: The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey

Based on a true story, The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn is a heart-pounding novel of heroism and desperation. Ludmila (Mila) Pavlichenko is 15 when she is romanced by an ass of a man who gets her pregnant. He’s a doctor and incredibly demeaning to her, but Mila’s father knows high-ranking Soviets and they are married. Mila is a scholar and between working in a factory and studying at university, she is able to support her son with the help of her parents. But Hilter’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia upends her plans and suddenly she is working as sniper.

The callous nature of her husband meant that she was doing rifle training so she could be father and mother to her son. “Never miss” became her mantra and during the war, it meant she was a lethal hunter. Mila becomes known as Lady Death. She has two wartime romances and finds herself on the American goodwill tour to convince Roosevelt to send troops to help the Soviets. It’s in Washington DC where she befriends Eleanor Roosevelt.

The author’s note at the end of Kate Quinn’s novels are always informative and this one is extraordinary. This is the little-known story of an incredible woman who did remarkable things.

Check out Kate Quinn’s website for more.

The audiobook has fantastic production quality. This one is a great listen.

Published by HarperCollins Canada

Tom Lake is an absolutely stunning book about love, how you don’t really know your parents, trauma, choice and destiny.

Ann Patchett is one of my favourite writers because she just settles into your brain like no other writer. This book is about a northern Michigan family caught up in the COVID pandemic who have to hunker down to get the cherries off the trees in their orchard. The families of labourers who normally come are not available. And if they don’t get the cherries off then it affects their livelihood. To pass the time, or to get away from the stress of the current time, the 3 grown daughters have asked their mother Lara to tell them about when she was an actress dating the now-famous actor Peter Duke.

What transpires is a beautiful look at the ways we love people, and how that love matures (or doesn’t depending on the person). I also felt that this novel was about the trauma of the pandemic, the existential dread, the what-ifs you ask about your own life.

Lara’s youngest daughter desperately wants to be an actor so she doesn’t understand how Lara stepped away from it all. Lara’s eldest daughter as a teenager truly believed that she was Peter Duke’s daughter and although she’s come around, the mistrust is still there between mother and daughter. And could their father be any kinder a human being? He is the loveliest character of them all, a steady rock throughout. In many ways, this story is about catharsis. For Lara, she is examining a time in her life that is seemingly behind her, but the more she considers the story from her daughters’ points of view, and goes deeper into that time herself, the more it’s clear that this is a past, unresolved trauma. It’s not behind her (yet), but without talking it through, there is no closure.

Ann Patchett is masterful in how she weaves in multiple stories about the different characters, but also brings in the richness of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town and Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Classics that I now must re-read in order to appreciate even more the rich talent on display in this novel.

You don’t need to read Our Town before reading Tom Lake but if you know the play then the novel is an even better read. Undoubtably you will read Our Town after reading Tom Lake so the publishers should really bundle these two together. The opening passage of Our Town still haunts me. It’s a beautiful play about everyday life and what we see (and miss) in the passage of a lifetime. Lara’s acting experience revolts around her role as Emily, and it’s made me appreciate Ann Patchett and Thorton Wilder all the more.

Published by HarperCollins Canada