Week 11
This week I celebrated Eid with my family. I’ve been baking mini egg cookies from this recipe, and I’ve become obsessed with them. I’ve made 3 batches now, frozen half and eaten the other half with my family. My sister came to visit for Eid, and she’s convinced me to use brown butter and speckled eggs to make an elite cookie. The cookies are in the freezer - I will let you know how they came out.
Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
I really enjoyed this! It’s a novel primarily about 2 characters, Laure and Erica, who meet on Erica’s pre-university trip to Europe. A romance begins between them, but there are several things that go wrong. It’s the kind of novel I love, spanning their lifetime, countries, decades and I loooove reading books where you can see exactly how the characters have matured, and grown, and how they have, in some ways, stayed exactly the same. But, what felt unusual in a good way, was that the secondary characters felt just as rich and developed as the primary characters. I loved the sense of community in this book, specifically with Laure’s friends. I loved the added complexity of the timing of this novel; what it meant to be gay, what it was like to be accepted as a queer person, what it was like to be hated as a queer person. I loved that Paris was its own character in this novel, almost like NYC being a character in Sex and the City. I don’t think the writing was particularly complex, but it was very good.
Rating: ★★★★★
A Family Matter by Claire Lynch
I really enjoyed this book too. It’s a sort of parallel story told in pieces of Heron, an eldery man, and his daughter, Maggie. Heron is facing a life changing diagnosis and what this means for him, and Maggie. Maggie is dealing with her own life, her loss of self in motherhood, her relationship with her father that is fierce and close and protective due to abandonment from her mother. But Maggie later learns something, completely by accident, that starts to unravel everything she had previously believed.
And again, I really enjoyed this. It felt almost like reading an alien book, the outdated laws, attitudes, the difficulties women faced not too long ago. How much we have progressed. It felt SO stark, almost unbelievable, but it is very much a book based on historical attitudes towards certain things. Maggie felt like a real character, the writing was beautiful, Dawn was an incredible character I could’ve read more and more about. I think what really struck me was something towards the end of the novel, of grief and time and acceptance of what has happened. Of having to pick yourself up.
Rating: ★★★★☆