Dolly Alderton
Anyone who knows me knows that my true podcast love is The High Low, a weekly news and pop-culture podcast hosted by British journalists Pandora Sykes and Dolly Alderton. Dolly released her very first book - a memoir - in January this year, and lets just say I found a way around my self-imposed book ban to get my hands on a copy. (I forced my brother to buy it for me as a gift 'from Thailand' where he was earlier this year. I have no shame.) The illicit effort was more than worth it - Dolly's book was a balm to my world-weary soul. She writes about boys, friends, and (trying to) grow up with such open-heartedness and humour. I recognised my actions and (most often harmful) patterns of thinking in so many of her stories. We may have grown up on opposite ends of the earth but it turns out that adolescence and the ensuing years are universally heartbreaking and refining. The thing - or people, rather - that sustained Dolly through these years are the same people who have sustained me: my best friends. (I even have my very own Farly - Rebekah. Those who've read the book will get what I mean by that!). My friends are everything to me; they have walked me through the best and worst seasons of my life just as I have walked them through theirs. At the end of the day, everything I have learned about love has come from my family and friends and reading Dolly's book made me realise just how grateful I am for that.
J Courtney Sullivan
J Courtney Sullivan has been one of my favourite contemporary writers ever since I read Commencement back in high school. She writes skilfully about complex friendships and family relationships - all the themes I love. Saints for All Occasions has all the elements of a story I would love: links to Ireland, immigration, family conflict. But... the way Sullivan put these elements together fell flat for me. The first half of the book was fantastic; Sullivan sets the scene and tone of the novel by outlining two sisters' move from Ireland to the United States. The second half, though building towards something, progressed far too slowly and that 'something' that loomed large over the story turned out to be quite anti-climatic. I don't know if this was what Sullivan intended with her novel; maybe the point was to see that small things as well as big can lead to discord within a family. Overall, though, I was left a little disappointed that the story didn't grip me the way her previous books have. Oh well - onward to her next book!
Madeleine L'Engle
Of course this book made it on here just in time for the film adaptation by Ava Duvernay which, truth be told, I still haven't seen. (And, after hearing some reviews, maybe don't need to see?) A Wrinkle in Time is so far outside of my usual genre it's not even funny, but with my literary heroine/spiritual mother Madeleine L'Engle at the helm, it's a book I've wound up loving. I empathise with Meg and her impatience; I, too, am prone to angry rants when things aren't progressing as I would like them. The story is, of course, fantastical, being a science fiction novel. The members of the Murry family travel to strange and frightening lands through 'wrinkles' in time; accompanied by mystical beings at some points, utterly deserted at others. I love Madeleine L'Engle's quotations from literature and scripture strewn throughout; so many of her favourite writers are familiar to me from reading the Crosswicks Journals. I understand why A Wrinkle in Time has remained a favourite all these years; its adventurous heart is universally appealing and its truths are timeless. I hope to share them with my own children someday.
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