Flawed Characters in Fiction
I’m popping in with two little treats for you today: two new releases I enjoyed, both debut novels. But first, how was your weekend? I’m curious about how many of my readers got a dumping of snow. We got 45cm of it on Sunday! I countered it by cooking. I baked the most delicious blueberry muffins. I think they’re my best ones yet (which I’m proud of because I modified the recipe with a special touch). And then for dinner, I made a slow-cooker pulled pork for the carnivores in our house, and burritos with Mexican rice, guac, and a dandelion leaf salad for the vegetarians. Everything was delicious, but the highlight of the snow day was dessert. This giant skillet cookie here with a tub of vanilla ice cream. We all sat around our living room table, discussed the shovelling (of both snow and warm cookie) we were about to embark on and dug in.
As promised, the two books today are:
Dandelion is Dead, by Rosie Storey
which is a rom-dramedy about a 37 year old woman, Poppy, who has lived in the shadow of her sister, Dandelion, all her life. When Dandelion suddenly dies, Poppy is left trying to figure out who she is without her sister. Drowning with grief, she tries to take on Dandelion’s personality by responding to an unanswered Hinge message in Dandelion’s inbox, pretending to be her. The recipient of said message is Jake, father of little Billy and newishly separated from his wife who has started dating a twenty-something-year-old, hot, fitness enthusiast.
Both characters are on the cusp of midlife, trying to figure out if there is more to life than what they’ve landed on. Poppy is already in a relationship with a man; they have a life together; they share a flat together; he wants children together. And Jake—he’s is in the middle of dealing with a crisis at work and trying to come to terms with his ex-wife’s much younger boyfriend who has just moved into his old house and is now playing step-dad to his son.
Both Poppy and Jake are wonderfully real and flawed characters, but they’re also funny in that uniquely British way. At times, Jake is outright hilarious. They cheat, they lie, and they often, frustratingly, refuse to face the truth. Even Dandelion, Poppy’s dead sister, who is also a big, albeit dead, character in the story, has her own flaws.
Rosie Storey take us along through the ups and downs as Poppy and Jake bumble through their lies, grief, and old wounds to find a way to be with each other.
Isn’t the cover gorgeous too?
Book two is:
Every Happiness, by Reena Shah
This book comes out in February, and I think it’s worth putting on your reading list if you enjoy flawed, far from perfect characters who frustrate you to no end (in a good way of course) because they refuse to admit their feelings for each other and get sucked into passive aggressive bouts of jealousy.
The story is about the friendship between two women, Deepa and Ruchi, who meet in 1962, as 12-year-olds, when Ruchi joins Our Lady English Medium School for Girls in India. Deepa, the more out-going of the two befriends her, and thus starts a friendship marked by an unacknowledged desire that carries them into adulthood and across continents, to the suburbs of Connecticut.
After school, Deepa marries a doctor, and not long after, Ruchi marries an engineer. They both move to the US, but Deepa, it seems, has a much easier time adapting to her new life than Ruchi does. Deepa gets a daughter, and Ruchi, a son. As in real life, both are less than perfect mothers, one is cold, emotionally unavailable, the other smothers. It seems like they are always in competition with each other, yet they love each other deeply. There’s a desire and codependency there, but they lack the awareness or courage to act on it.
I felt like this one was more of a character study than a plot heavy book. The story jumps back and forth in time and points of view, as Reena Shah shows us her characters in the different stages of their lives, but it start in 1992, with the premise of the story, when Deepa’s husband is under suspicion for insurance fraud, on the verge of losing everything he has built, and Ruchi, working in his medical office, knows all about it.
Let me know if you’ve read either novels or maybe have them on your wish list. Also, what have you been reading lately?
Stay warm. Until next time,
XO Ingrid
I've started The Correspondent as it was on so many end of year lists! (late to the party!). Thanks for putting these on our radar.
Snow snow snow! Lovely.
Those books sound delightful.