Review: Dolly All The Time (by Annabel Monaghan)

My Rating: 5 stars

I’m usually not much of a romance reader, not because of anything wrong with the genre, but mostly because of my own misplaced biases when it comes to real-life romantic relationships.  For the most part, my general attitude toward romantic love is a cynical one (probably attributable to the fact that I’ve seen and/or experienced my fair share of bad relationships in real life), to the point that, over the years, I’ve pretty much internalized the romance trope of “happily ever after” as a fictional illusion that only occurs in fairy tales.  Okay, to put it more bluntly – since I’ve never bought into the idea of “happily ever after,” it makes sense that given this concept’s prevalence in romance novels as well as my lack of belief in its existence (in reality that is), I’m generally not interested in reading about it over and over again in romance novels.  That being said, this doesn’t mean that I don’t read romances at all, rather it means that I am incredibly picky with the romances I do choose to read.  While there isn’t any specific “criteria” per se in terms of what types of romances I prefer to read or not to read, I do tend to be drawn to those that have more or less the following elements: 1) a strong female protagonist with a growth arc that allows her character to evolve and grow (basically the opposite of the stereotypical “damsel in distress” trope), 2) witty banter (the fun and non-offensive kind), whether between the main couple or the other characters in the story, 3) a believable main couple that I can root for (if they have sizzling chemistry, all the better, lol), 4) humor, whether ironic or sardonic, as long as it’s not hurtful or mean, 5) delightful, funny, and/or endearing supporting characters (which sometimes can make or break a story even more than the main couple), and 6) emotional depth that has the ability to make me both laugh and cry. [Sidenote: If you’re thinking at this point that it sounds like I’m describing a Jane Austen novel, you would be absolutely right, since Austen is one of my favorite authors].

Annabel Monaghan’s newest work, Dolly All the Time, is exactly one of those romances that encompasses all 6 of the above elements, and then some!  The main protagonist, Dolly, is capable, competent, dependable, hardworking, yet at the same time also has a fun personality – I was drawn to her from the start.  But more than anything, I connected with Dolly on a deeper level because of her role as a caretaker – a reliable “fixer” who finds it “easier to take care of things than to ask for help,” resulting in her putting everyone else’s needs in front of her own. I’ve been the main breadwinner and caretaker of my family since I was 18 years old (I’m in my forties now) and, like Dolly, my “whole identity [was] tied up in doing everything for everyone.” I’ve never known how to not be responsible, to not fix things, to not try to help come up with a solution to a problem. At one point in the book, Dolly notes the following: “One thing about caretakers is they are never carefree.  Without our cares, we’d just be takers like everyone else.” This is probably my favorite quote from the book because it so succinctly encapsulates the essence of who Dolly is as person, but at the same time, it also captures perfectly what those of us who are lifelong caretakers instinctively understand:  that we will always have a fear of asking for things for ourselves not because it goes against our selfless natures, but rather, because we can’t afford to be selfish, especially when everyone is relying on us to keep all the plates constantly spinning. And it is precisely because of this that I cried tears of joy when Dolly, in falling in love with Stewart, finds it in herself to let go and loosen up, even if only for a little while: “My favorite thing about myself…is that I don’t need help.  I make do.  I’m someone who can make something out of nothing.  This summer I loosened up on that a little, sort of pretending I was a different kind of person.  I wasn’t gripping my righteousness so tightly…I actually felt like myself, just not so tired.  Not thinking of every single other person before myself.  I’d like to figure out how to be her all the time.”

With the character of Dolly, Monaghan created a character so relatable that I honestly never want to stop reading about her.  I feel like I have so much to learn from Dolly — through her, I see what’s possible, the light at the end of the tunnel.  I honestly haven’t felt so inspired by a book in a long time and yes, I want to hold onto that feeling for a while longer (which is one reason why aim taking my precious time writing this review).  I love this book so much that, as soon as I finished it, I went and added all of Annabel Monaghan’s books to my TBR (and hope to incorporate as many of them as I can in between my other reads, especially during times when I’m craving a lighthearted pick-me-up).  

Given how much I loved this book, it’s probably quite obvious that I would highly recommend it, but more so, I would actually recommend listening to the audio version narrated by the inimitable Julia Whelan (one of my favorite audiobook narrators).  Her performance of this book truly elevated it to the highest levels — for me, it definitely made the difference between a 4-4.5 star read to a solid 5 stars! 

Review: Goodbye Chinatown (by Kit Fan)

My Rating: 3.5 stars

As a Hong Kong native, I’m always on the lookout for books about or set in the city of my birth, especially ones that are truly HK-focused – meaning written by authors actually born in or based in HK and who are familiar with the city’s culture, history, places, people, etc.  Therefore, going into Kit Fan’s second novel Goodbye Chinatown, I should’ve been excited, but instead, I was a bit apprehensive, as I had read his debut novel Diamond Hill back in 2021 and despite that book’s authentic portrayal of HK, I did not like the writing overall and struggled to get through it (and unsurprisingly, I ended up rating that one only 2 stars).  I didn’t know if this second novel would go down the same disappointing path as Fan’s previous one, so I picked this one up with some hesitation, though I’m happy to report that this one ended up being a very different book, both in style and tone, and surprised me in a good way.

This time around, Fan sets his story primarily in the UK (London, specifically), with Hong Kong serving as a secondary setting – only in the background during the first half of the book and then at the forefront during the second half – with the family at the center of the story being of Cantonese descent and also having the surname Fan.  After the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, Mr. and Mrs. Fan decided to leave Hong Kong with their 10-year-old daughter Amber in tow, eventually settling in London’s Chinatown and opening a Chinese restaurant called The Golden Palace.  Flash forward 12 years, The Golden Palace is no more, as it was bought out (ironically) by Mainland Chinese investors several years ago, but young Amber, who is now an Oxford-educated chef, decides to open a Chinese fusion restaurant she names Luna. Meanwhile, Amber’s parents make the decision to return to their home city of Hong Kong, taking their 4-year-old grandson Bobby with them.  Left behind to run her new restaurant, Amber channels her loneliness into the complex dishes that she makes and soon, Luna becomes the talk of the town and goes on to earn a Michelin star after a mysterious woman named Celeste pays a visit and provides Amber with some much-needed advice and support. 

Set primarily after the return of Hong Kong to China, with the shadow of “the June 4^th Incident” (HK people’s name for the Tiananmen Massacre) lingering constantly in the background, the story, at its core, is about an immigrant family’s struggle to reconcile the two disparate cultures that shape their lives and ultimately, their identities.  Amber is the main focus in much of the story, as we track the various changes that occur in her life against the backdrop of major world events such as the aftermath of the 1997 HK handover, 9/11, the Asian financial crisis in 2008, the HK student protests and umbrella movement in 2019, and finally, the onset of Covid in 2020.

I was around Amber’s age when Tiananmen occurred and I remember the nearly identical scene in the book occurring in my own household -- the chaos unfolding on TV and my parents watching with mouths open and tears streaming down their faces; celebrities and ordinary citizens alike, dressed in black, their faces grim, some crying, all holding candles and singing solemn, heart-wrenching ballads in televised vigils; and of course, in the aftermath of such a tragic event, the pervasive fear throughout Hong Kong that what happened in Tiananmen could happen to them too once the city is returned to China – a fear that prompted many of Hong Kong’s 7 million+ citizens to frantically look into the fastest ways to get themselves and their families out of the city before 1997 came along.  As a Hong Konger who grew up in the shadow of Tiananmen, I absolutely related to so many aspects of this story – in particular, this passage from the story summed up perfectly my own memories of how the event impacted my family and so many others at the time: “Sitting in the dark, [Amber] remembered the tens of thousands of candles of the televised vigils in the aftermath of Tiananmen, where everyone had worn black and sung heart-breaking songs about heroes—how bodies became mountains and how the colour of blood turned into the colour of a nation’s flag. Grief consumed images at a faster rate. Her parents had reassured Amber that the family had gone out onto the streets in solidarity. They’d choked back tears as they sang at the top of their lungs, mourning for the students and feeling proud and scared of a single man stopping a column of tanks, standing up for the freedom and democracy they still held dear. Among an ocean of like-minded citizens, they stood there, witnessing and being witnessed. Those were times when grief became an engine of fear, when parental responsibility meant emigration.”

Indeed, there were many beautiful passages such as the above in this book, but I especially loved the descriptions of the HK foods and dishes, many of which were familiar to me, as well as Amber’s interesting fusion take on this cuisine (I especially want to try the pineapple bun burger, which there is a recipe for in the book).  The food and historical elements aside though, the complexity of Amber’s family dynamics as well as her personal struggle with identity and meaning also resonated with me, with that said, I do wish that the family relationship part was explored a little more, as I felt that there was a certain lack of emotional depth to the story overall.

In terms of the main issue I had with this book (hence the 3.5 star rating), I echoed all the other reviewers’ complaint that the ending was too abrupt, to the point that the story felt incomplete.  I honestly felt shocked and disappointed when I reached what I thought would be the climax of the story, only to turn the page and see the Acknowledgements section.  I initially thought that perhaps I turned the pages too quickly and maybe missed a page or two (or three), but nope, I had truly reached the end of the book -- given how invested I was in the story, the poorly executed ending hit especially hard for me.  Also, the last segment of the book (the chapters that take place in 2020) felt kind of rushed, which also contributed to why I couldn’t bring myself to rate this higher. 

Overall, I definitely enjoyed this novel much more than Fan’s debut, but the structure issues unfortunately impacted my reading experience more than I would have liked.  Hopefully Fan’s next novel will see improvement with this.

Received ARC from World Editions via NetGalley.

Review: Tata (by Valerie Perrin, translated by Hildegarde Serle)

My Rating: 3.5 stars

When I first read the premise for Valerie Perrin’s latest novel Tata, I was greatly intrigued.  Agnes Dugain receives a phone call from the police informing her that her paternal aunt Colette has died.  This news puzzles Agnes because, well, her aunt Colette had already died 3 years ago and was buried in a cemetery in the French city of Gueugnon.  When Agnes goes to identify the body, she is shocked to discover that the woman who just died truly is Colette -- did her aunt die twice then?  Or is someone else buried in Colette’s grave?  How did this happen?  And most importantly, why?  This mystery of Colette’s “second death” forms the central premise of a compelling and complicated story – one that weaves back and forth between past and present as well via multiple alternating perspectives, including a suitcase full of audio cassettes that Colette left behind for her niece.  Over the course of investigating the mysterious circumstances surrounding her aunt’s death, Agnes also untangles a complex web of revelations that ultimately point her toward some profound truths about not just herself, but also the family she thought she knew. 

I have serious mixed feelings toward this novel.  On the one hand, I was absolutely riveted by Colette’s story – I found the mystery surrounding her two deaths interesting and was completely invested in getting to the truth of what happened and why.  I also liked many of the characters in Colette’s story arc, including Colette herself, which added to my interest in the story.

Unfortunately, however, the execution of the story was problematic and did not work for me, which of course impacted my reading experience.  Specifically, the way the story was told felt like it was all over the place, as it kept jumping around between various seemingly unrelated threads that were interspersed, literally, throughout Colette’s story.  For example, Agnes would go from talking about Colette to suddenly jumping to her own ill-fated love story with her ex-husband Pierre, recounting how they met, the whirlwind relationship they had, how it all fell apart when he cheated on her, and how even though they are divorced, she still pines for him, etc.  Honestly, I could care less about Agnes’s love life or her yearning for her jerk of a husband, and I also didn’t see how that relationship had anything to do with the main thread of the story, so I was kind of annoyed that it kept getting brought up.  As if that weren’t enough though, there were also entire sections that were seemingly dedicated to the backstories of each of Agnes’s childhood friends, with whom she is reunited when she returns to Gueugnon to investigate her aunt’s death.  While some of those friends’ backstories covered important topics, none of them were relevant to Colette’s story as far as I could see.

Basically, it felt to me that Colette’s story kept getting interrupted every couple pages with different tangents – some relevant, some not – so that, at multiple points throughout, the story started not making sense anymore, as all the jumping around between threads made the story less cohesive and harder to follow.  This brings me to the other issue I had with the book: at 600+ pages, it was WAY TOO LONG!  The writing was also extremely choppy, with single word sentences as well as a lot of sentences that seemed to be missing words here and there – not to mention some very long run-on sentences that went on for paragraphs -- to the point that, at times, I felt like I was reading pages of incoherent text.  This of course made for a very tedious read – though with that said, since the version of the book I read was an unedited ARC, I will give the author and translator the benefit of the doubt here in terms of all the issues with the writing.

Overall, this was a good story with a compelling premise that had the potential to be great if only it had been more tightly written and edited.  Colette’s story was definitely fascinating and the revelations at the end, when the connections between some of the threads were brought to light, seriously made my jaw drop – it’s just too bad that it took so much meandering to get there.

Received ARC from Europa Editions via NetGalley.

Review: The Calamity Club (by Kathryn Stockett)

My Rating: 4.5 stars

Whew, this book was long!  At 650+ pages (28+ hours on audio), Kathryn Stockett’s The Calamity Club is an epic force of a novel that, despite its length, is well worth the read.  Set in Oxford, Mississippi in 1933, the story alternates between the perspectives of eleven-year-old Margot “Meg” Lefleur, one of the precocious “big girls” at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum who lives a lonely life being constantly mistreated by the orphanage’s horrid director, and twenty-four-year-old Birdie Calhoun, an outspoken spinster from the Mississippi Delta who visits her sister in the hopes of asking for her help with their struggling family back home, but finds herself entrenched in a cataclysmic situation involving her sister’s family that ends up changing her life forever. 

The meticulousness of Stockett’s research definitely shines through here, as the historical details are vividly rendered throughout, making the story both incredibly atmospheric and immersive.  I absolutely felt transported to the Depression-era South – a historically significant time period where various prejudices and hypocrisies related to race, gender, and class were rampant.  Under such circumstances, the story’s two female protagonists – Birdie and Meg – must constantly fight to live their lives the way they choose to rather than the way others expect them to.  Thematically, Stockett covers a lot of ground with this story – abandonment, alcoholism, abuse, women’s rights, family dynamics, race and gender relations, death, grief, etc.—with many of these themes woven seamlessly into the story alongside the historical elements in such a way so as not to impact the story’s flow and pacing.  In addition, despite the heaviness of these themes, Stockett also managed to balance them out with lightheartedness and humor where appropriate, which I definitely appreciated.

Historical aspects aside, another area that truly stands out with this story is its characters, all of whom are tremendously well-developed, both heroes and villains alike.  In this regard, I highly highly recommend listening to the audiobook version of the story, as the two narrators, Jenna Lamia and January LaVoy, do an especially astounding job – they not only bring the two main characters Birdie and Meg to life, they also bring the rest of the characters to life as well through the way they perform the other characters’ voices with different accents and tones, to the point that I actually felt like I was listening to a full cast narration. Given how realistic the narrators made these characters come across, I felt fully invested in their lives and wanted to know what would happen to them (and of course, I was rooting for them every step of the way as they fought to rise above their circumstances).

With all that said, I definitely agree with all the other reviewers who’ve mentioned how unnecessarily long this book is and how perhaps it could benefit from some editing.  In addition to some sections that were more overly descriptive than they needed to be, some of the storylines could’ve also been trimmed down somewhat.  Here again, I recommend listening to the audio version because the narration is so exceptionally done that it immerses you fully into the story and makes the somewhat draggier parts feel less tedious.

Lastly, I think I’m probably one of the few people on the planet who has not yet read Stockett’s first novel The Help (despite it being on my TBR for ages), but I hope to rectify that soon, as I really enjoyed Stockett’s writing and storytelling here and since her debut is considered her masterpiece, it definitely needs to be moved to my “must-read” list!

Received ARC from Spiegel & Grau via NetGalley.

Review: The Best Dog in the World: Essays on Love (edited by Alice Hoffman)

My Rating: 4.5 stars

Written by 14 authors who are also dog-lovers and dog-owners, this collection of essays warmed my heart!  I read this in pretty much one sitting because I couldn’t get enough of these sweet canine creatures and all the different ways they teach us about love and affection, empathy and joy, and everything else in between.  I may not be a pet-owner myself (not because I don’t want to, but because there are too many people in my family who are allergic in some way), but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t relate to this collection, as I do have a soft spot for dogs and have plenty of friends and neighbors whose dogs I’ve happily played with and smothered with love and affection.  With that said though, I can’t help but be envious of those same friends and neighbors who are on the receiving end of their canine companions’ unfettered love and adoration day in and day out, so reading a book like this one definitely helps to satiate that envy (LOL).

I definitely recommend picking up this essay collection, especially if you are a dog-owner.  If you’re not a dog-owner (and perhaps not a dog-lover either), I still suggest picking this one up—who knows, you might be won over by these delightful reflections on life accompanied by the most loyal and devoted of pets.

Review: Five (by Ilona Bannister)

My Rating: 4 stars

This book was wild and honestly unlike anything I’ve read before!  From the first page, we already know that one of the five people waiting on a train platform in London will die.  It is 7:01am and the death will occur within the next few minutes, when the next train is scheduled to arrive.  The main question is, which of the five will it be (and secondarily, will it be an accident or deliberate)?  The premise sounds simple and to be honest, when I first started reading, I was wondering how the story was going to play out – I mean, given that everything is supposed to happen within a few minute timespan, how could the story possibly last the entire 240 pages?   I was definitely intrigued and drawn in by the seemingly simple setup at the start of the story where we are introduced to each of the main characters in a way that breaks the fourth wall, with the reader not only being addressed directly, but also given instructions to pay attention to certain things.  And it turned out that I didn’t have to wait long to find out how the author, Ilona Bannister, manages to turn a five-minute premise into a 240-page story, as, interspersed throughout the train station scene, we are given each of the five character’s backstories. But even here, the execution of the story is not as simple as it may seem, for we learn things about each character during these intervening chapters that will end up having an impact on how we view the train station scene.  Specifically, we won’t be able to help formulating opinions about each of the characters based on what we read about them, and ultimately, this influences our judgement of the story’s outcome – basically, who dies and the deeper moral question of whether they deserve it -- which of course, is not revealed until the last few pages.

This is one of the most interesting, engaging, and uniquely original stories I’ve read in a long time.  As a reader, I definitely felt that I had a vested interest in the story from start to finish, despite the fact that I was able to guess “the death” early on.  With this book, the thrill is actually in the process of getting to the outcome – that is, learning about each character, their vices, their desperation, and, most importantly, the circumstances that brought them to this moment at the train station – and then using everything we learned to justify (or not) the death at the end of the story.  So essentially, this story is a study of the base impulses and instincts that make up human nature, with the reader, then, basically forced to be judge and jury.  This is, no doubt, a clever setup and if I were to look at this book from a writing / craft perspective (i.e.: the brilliant way the story was executed), it probably deserves a 5.  However, I’m the type of reviewer who puts more emphasis on reading experience and how a book or story made me feel -- in this regard, well, I found all of the characters reprehensible and, as such, couldn’t bring myself to like any of them (which, now that I think about it, was probably the author’s point in structuring the story the way she did). Given my frustration with the characters, which did impact my reading experience, but yet still recognizing the brilliance of the story, I figured a 4 was the fairest way to go. 

Overall, this was a compelling and fascinating read that I definitely recommend, especially if you are into slow-burn, character-driven psychological thrillers.  Speaking of which, for me, this was one of the “truest” psychological dramas I’ve read in a long time, in the sense that I actually felt challenged psychologically as a reader, to stop and think and assess, then to doubt and re-assess (and repeat this process, sometimes to no avail). This one definitely requires that you put in the work (both mentally and psychologically), so I would say keep that in mind if you do decide to pick this up.