Despite the fact that it’s tempting fate, given what happened with Pineapple Street last week and then BotW, I’m going to take a chance on mentioning that the new Katherine Heiny book is out today – and it’s a collection of short stories. Why am I taking this risk? Well given that Early Morning Riser and Standard Deviation have both featured on the blog and I’ve recommended and loaned them out, it feels logical that I should mention a new book from her. Single, Carefree, Mellow which was her first book was also a short story collection, which I read after I had read and loved Standard Deviation. Looking back at my goodreads reviews, I’ve definitely preferred Heiny’s novels so far so I’m looking forward to seeing how this compares and if her short story style has evolved after two novels.
Given that I’ve talked twice in the last week about how much I like books about Rich People Problems, I thought it was finally time for me to finish that post about that sort of novel – given that it’s more than a year since my round up of non-fiction books about the same sort of thing.
Firstly, what do I mean when I say Rich People Problems? Well it’s hard to put my finger on exactly, but I’m talking about the sort of novel where the characters are living the sort of lives that most of us can only dream of – and the problems they have are less imminent risk of death or destruction and more can’t afford a summer house in the fashionable resort any more/why is it so hard to be rich. Often you’re looking at their lives through the prism of an outsider – or a newly arrived person in the group, like you are with Sasha in Pineapple Street.
That’s also the case with Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, which is probably the book in this category that most people have heard of (or watched the film of) where Rachel Chu heads off to Singapore to go to a wedding with her boyfriend, only to discover that he’s a member of one of the richest families in the city state and part of a whole hierarchy of old money/new money rivalries that she’s got to try and navigate. It’s a trilogy and although the first one is my favourite, they’re all brilliant for reading on a sunlounger (which is one of my favourite times to read this sort of book!). It’s success spawned a whole host of other similar books of which I’ve read a few (including Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho) but you could also probably say Dial A for Aunties is adjacent to this, as the billionaire wedding that they’re catering is for a very similar sort of family to the ones Rachel meets in Singapore.
The people in it aren’t as rich as the Singapore set, but Emma Straub’s Modern Lovers is also a Rich People Problems novel, except all the rich people in it are Hipsters. This is about a group of friends who were in a band together in their youth but as their kids leave home, their lives start to unravel and long buried secrets start to come to light. If books about people who can afford to privately educate their kids despite not always having a job annoy you, then maybe don’t read this. If you do like that sort of thing (and you can tell from this post that I do!) then fill your boots with this! See also Straub’s other novel The Vacationers, which sees a family summer in Mallorca go not entirely according to plan. Where’d You Go Bernadette could probably also go on this list, although it’s sort of hard to explain why without spoiling the plot of the book – but it’s definitely not the sort of life that most of us have.
In YA, Katherine McGee’s American Royals probably fits into this genre too – the premise is that when American gained independence, they set up their own royal family, and you’re following the latest generation as they try to grapple with their inheritance. It’s much broader in characterisation than some of the other books I’ve mentioned here – and importantly – it is the first in a series and doesn’t have a resolution to any of the major strands so read at your peril/depending on your preferences on that front. Also in YA, as I said in my BotW post about it back in 2020, Meg Rosoff’s The Great Godden is Rich people Problems adjacent.
And there you are – that’s your lot today. I’ve stuck to contemporary novels rather than historical stuff – I mean you could basically count any historical romance as Rich People Problems in a way. And I’ve resisted the urge to recommend Eligible again (oops) although you could probably pick a Pride and Prejudice retelling of your choice in here too, and this has reminded me of a bunch of stuff I have waiting on the shelves to be read that could fit this post – so there may yet be a part two!
Well as I mentioned yesterday, picking a book for today was a bit of a problem of my own making. I mean I try not to do release day posts and then make them my books of the week, but I did it with Romantic Comedy and I’m doing it again today. Romantic Comedy perhaps not a surprise because: Curtis Sittenfeld, but this – well, I had other stuff on the go last week that I thought was going to be an option for today, but it turns out, nope. So here we are. Anyway, I really enjoyed reading Pineapple Street and it deserves not to just a mention in Quick Reviews at the end of the month.
The Pineapple Street of the title is the road in Brooklyn Heights where the Stockton family own a house. It’s not their only house, but it is the house where Cord, Darley and Georgiana grew up. Their parents have just moved out to allow Cord and his new wife Sasha to move in and the sisters have added this to the list of black marks against their new sister-in-law, which also includes being middle class, being from New England (but not in a good way) and basically not being The Right Sort. To Sasha the family seem weirdly close, full of rituals and traditions designed to exclude her and make her feel like she’ll never understand them. The sisters have other problems too – Darley is struggling to figure out who she is now she’s a stay at home mum with two kids instead of a high powered worker at an investment bank and Georgiana has fallen in love for the first time – but it’s with the wrong person.
As I said last week – sound the Rich People Problems klaxon! I love a novel about people with the sort of lives most of us can’t even conceive and this is a really good one. I read this in 24 hours – and if I hadn’t had to go to work it would have been less. As well as making you want to just keep turning the pages to find out what happens next, it’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you roll your eyes and by the end you’ll have a lot more sympathy than you were expecting for both Georgiana and Darley – and of course you’re rooting for Sasha from the start. I could happily have spent even longer with them all – but actually the epilogue is a glorious touch and a great way to send them all off. We’re starting to reach the time of year where people start to go on beachy (or at least hot weather) holidays and this would make perfect sun lounger reading.
My copy came from NetGalley, but it’s looking fairly easy to get hold of – as I mentioned last week I saw it in a store before it was even released, but I saw it in both Foyles and Waterstones in Gower Street last week and so I suspect the physical copies will be easy to get hold of – hopefully even in airport edition. And of course it’s in Kindle and Kobo too.
Well. Two nights away from home off the back of a bank holiday Monday, and today’s list is long, but doesn’t feature any of the long runners, which is a it of a fail. However I am relatively up to date with this month’s NetGalley releases, so that should count for something right? It does mean I’m in a bit of a pickle about what I write about tomorrow, because there is a clear front runner but, well, you’ll see tomorrow. Apologies in advance…
This week we’re back in the theatre as we had a wonderful night at Private Lives last weekend and it’s been a while since I talked about a show.
For those who have never come across Noel Coward’s comedy, it is about a divorced couple who meet each other again on their honeymoons with their new spouses. Over the course of three acts you observe their stormy relationship – and the contrast with the people they have chosen for their second attempt at matrimony. At this point I’m going to take the opportunity to quote a bit of Gaudy Night at you, because it sums up the situation nicely, although as you can see Harriet doesn’t fancy a relationship like Elyot and Amanda’s at all – and of course it would be very tiring.
Otherwise one would get the sort of couple one had in Private Lives, who rolled on the floor and hammered one another when they weren’t making love, because they (obviously) had no conventional resources. A vista of crashing boredom, either way.
Gaudy Night, Dorothy L Sayers
In the new production at the Donmar Warehouse, Elyot is played by Stephen Mangan and Amanda by Rachael Stirling and they really do go for each other when they’re not intertwined on the sofa. The physical violence between the couple is the bit that can feel the most dated (it was written in 1930) but if the chemistry between the leads is right, they can carry you through it – you believe in the rollercoaster highs and lows of their relationship. In Stephen Mangan’s hands Elyot is more of a faded charmer with a wicked sense of humour than a dashing rake and Stirling’s Amanda is a woman who is fed up with being expected to stick to the conventions. It’s darker but it’s funny and the ending is brilliant.
It’s been a decade since I last saw Private Lives – that time with Toby Stephens and Anna Chancellor (which I enjoyed so much I went a second time with the family)and it’s a lot of fun to see a familiar text being polished up and exhibited afresh. The third act in particular has plenty of opportunities for interpretation. It was Him Indoors’ first time seeing any show more than once and it was fun to hear his thoughts on seeing something done differently. I think he preferred this version – I can’t decide, so maybe I should just go and see it again, again? Extraordinary how potent cheap music is…
Well, the pile was smaller for most of the month and then, well, suddenly it got a bit bigger. We’re missing one too – as I got my copy of Romantic Comedy delivered to the parents and I haven’t collected it yet. So that may yet appear in next month’s picture. Anyway, we have two more Diane Mott Davidsons as I continue to fill in the gaps around the ones that are available on Kindle. My sister and I both read about Reach for the Stars and said we had to have it but, couldn’t justify paying hardback prices, except this week there was an event for it at Foyles and so… I went. And I told you I had order This Bird Has Flown for click and collect in this weeks Week In Books – I picked it up Monday and started it immediately, which would have been fine as I had Waterstones stamps to spend on it, except I also bought the cozy crime. Ooops. Never mind.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written a series post about a Sherlock Holmes related series – I think this is the third now, and that’s only the tip of the Sherlockian universe. But this time it’s a young adult series set in a New England boarding school so you can see that this might have appealed to me!
Yes I only have three of the four books!
So in the first in the series, A Study in Charlotte, we mean Jamie Watson who has just got a rugby scholarship to a Connecticut prep school. He’s not massively keen on the idea – it’s too close to his estranged father but it’s also where Charlotte Holmes goes to school. She’s a descendent of Sherlock and Jamie would has spent his whole life trying to play down (or ignore) his connection to the the famous detective’s chronicler so the last thing he needs is for the two of them to be in the same place. But after a student dies at the school, the two of them are being set up to take the fall so they start working together to find the real culprit.
There are four books in the series and the first book is the most standalone of all of them – and when I first read it I was expecting any sequels to be self contained mysteries but the other three are very much interconnected. Charlotte Holmes is a Holmes reimagined, Mary Russell is a Holmes continuation and Brittany Cavallaro is doing Holmes the new generation – in a world where Sherlock’s adventures with Watson are famous and have left a legacy (and a fortune) for his descendants.
The pace of each novel tends to start of slowly and then pick up pace as the mysteries start to hurtle towards their conclusions. The final book is a little different because it’s less thriller, more mystery but it is a satisfying end to the series. I read the first in the series when I was in the US when the first one was the only one available and read the series across a period of years as they became available which was actually slightly complicated in the UK as they didn’t become available in paperback straightaway and they are not on in Kindle in the UK. They’re still a little tricky to get hold of if you’re here but hopefully not entirely impossible.
I mean I say out today – but I did find a copy of Pineapple Street in Waterstones on Saturday when I was looking for Susanna Hoffs’ novel. Anyway: NetGalley tells me it’s out today, and as Amazon was still only offering preorders on Kindle I’m going to assume that someone got a bit over excited and got it out early. This is Jenny Jackson’s debut and our first candidate of the year for a Rich People Problems book – and you know how much I love them.
Helpfully I also got sent this nice graphic which gives you some authors who have liked it – in case that’s a thing you use to help you chose books (I know I do). But this is a novel following the women of the Stockton family – the two daughters Darley and Georgiana and their brother’s wife Sasha. I started this on Tuesday and I’m really enjoying it so far and I’m hoping that continues. You may yet hear more about it…
It’s that time again – summon up your willpower (or not) because I’m about to round up the best kindle deals I could find on books or authors I like!
Lets start with the fact that very recent BotW and one of my favourites of the year, Funny You Should Ask is 99p. I wrote about the London Highwaymen pair of novels in the autumn and The Queer Principles of Kit Webb and The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes are both £1.99 again. Christina Lauren’s The Unhoneymooners is 99p – it’s a fake relationship enemies to lovers sort of story that I really enjoyed back in 2019 and obviously I’ve recommended several more of Christina Lauren’s books since then. Side note, they also seem to be getting reissues of their novels with new covers, so watch out for that if you’re the sort of person that remembers if you’ve read something based on the cover.
I mentioned Before the Coffee Gets Cold and its sequel in a Quick Reviews post back in 2021 – there are now four in the series about a cafe in Japan where you can travel back in time for the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee, but the first is 99p at the moment. Dear Mrs Bird is 99p at the moment – its sequel Yours Cheerfully was another 2021 BotW and the third in the series is out next month and I have a copy so will try and report back. Brit Bennet’s The Vanishing Half is 99p at the moment – it was one of my favourite books of 2020, and my mum has recently borrowed it off me and really enjoyed it as well. And In the Name of the Rose is 99p – I mentioned it in passing in my post about Mysteries with Vicars, but it’s a medieval murder mystery set among a community of monks with a famous document collection.
Just one non-fiction to mention – Paperback Crush is £1.62 – this history of teen fictions in the 80s and 90s was a BotW back in 2018, if you read through any of the era it’s worth a look. In books I have but haven’t read yet, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers is 99p at the moment
And then in the series that people might be collecting of the Wimsey‘s Whose Body and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club are 99p, while Unnatural Death is (the very weird price of) £1.28. The World of Blandings – which is the first two novels and some short stories – is 99p. Only one 99p Georgette Heyer this month and it’s April Lady which I really like, but there are a lot that are £1.99 – including some of my favourites like Devil’s Cub and Lady of Quality. Moving Pictures is this month’s cheap Discworld book and I’ve bought it while writing this because it’s been years since I read it and I want to see if my thoughts on it have changed (it wasn’t one of my favourites originally).
Yup, I’m going there. I can’t help it. I was trying to pace myself, but I had it finished before the end of release day so it had to be my pick this week.
So as previouslymentioned the plot of this is: Sally is a long time writer at a late night comedy sketch show called The Night Owls – known as TNO and definitely not SNL. She’s single but has watched the show’s actors fall in and out of love with guest stars on the show, but when her friend Danny starts dating a glamorous actress who was a guest host on the show she writes a sketch about average looking – or dorky – guys who get involved with beautiful women and how you never see the reverse and calls it the Danny Horst Rule. That week’s guest host is Noah Brewster – a music star whose romantic history (according to the gossip magazines) includes a lot of models. Noah and Sally hit it off as they work on sketches together but would someone like him ever date someone like her?
The first part of the book covers the production week of the show and then we jump ahead two years to Covid times when Sally is staying with her stepdad in Kansas City and Noah is in LA and they reconnect. It’s playing with the ideas of romantic comedy movies whilst also being a romantic comedy and following a lot of the rules that you would expect but in subtle (well sort of) ways. What I always enjoy about Curtis Sittenfeld’s books are the heroines – they’re always smart often a little (or a lot) neurotic and have interesting and not perfect lives and back stories. It’s fun just to spend time with them – but even more so when Sittenfeld is playing with something that you love – which I think is why I loved her Eligible (modern day retelling of Pride and Prejudice) so much. And this is a good one. If you follow celeb gossip in anyway you can probably work out who inspired the Danny Horst rule, but actually that’s just a device to set up everything else. I’ve read a bunch of books recently where one half of the couple is famous and the other isn’t and while a lot of them give their celebrities similar issues not all the books are good at it. And yes I realise that I’ve now recommended three of them in a very short time – but I’ve read more of them than that and haven’t told you about the rest!
I guess the main difference with this is that because it’s Curtis Sittenfeld it gets a hardback release and a photo cover (in the UK at least) rather than coming out in paperback with a cartoon/drawn cover like Nora Goes Off Script or Funny You Should Ask. But it’s actually much more similar to those in style and tone than it is to a lot of the other stuff that gets hardback releases. And that’s a good thing not a criticism. And it’s also a Reese Witherspoon pick. So that’s fun too.
Anyway, I have a physical copy of Romantic Comedy that is still on its way to me (it was a special edition for indie booksellers which has got held up in the bank holiday weekend post) but I also requested it from NetGalley before the preorder – not expecting to be approved but I was! Hence how I’ve managed to read it before my actual copy has arrived. It’s out now and available in all the stores – I saw it in Waterstones and Foyles at the weekend and it’s also in ebook on Kindle and Kobo and I’m audiobook. I suspect it’s the sort of thing that will also get an airport edition if you’re heading off on holiday and it would make a great sun lounger read.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 