Beautiful Ugly

Feeney, Alice. Beautiful Ugly. New York: Flatiron. 2025. Print.

First Sentences:

 

If all we need is love, why do we always want more? I dial her number. Again. Finally she answers.

Description:

I think Alice Feeney is one of my favorite "soft" thriller writers. Author of the twisty, gripping books Sometimes I Lie and Rock, Paper, Scissors among others, she takes ordinary people, often couples, and explores their personalities, relationships, dreams, and foibles that lead them into very tense, maybe threatening situations. No ax murders here, just edge-of-your-seat, something-funny-is-going-on-here, don't-know-what's-behind-that-door-that-I'm-about-to-foolishly-open kind of situation found on every page.  

 

Feeney's newest thriller, Beautiful Ugly is another fantastic read, full of sudden surprises, quirky characters, unexpected plot twists, and slightly unnerving settings. It opens with an author, Grady Green, talking on the phone with his wife while she is driving home to see him. She suddenly says she sees a body in the road and will stop to help. Grady warns her not to get out of the car, to stay safe, but she gets out anyways. That is the last she is heard from.

One year later, Grady is struggling. He desperately misses his best friend wife. He cannot afford mortgage payments on their house, so moves to a cheap hotel while trying to write the second novel he is contracted to produce (and has spent the advance for).

Fortunately, his publishing agent has inherited a small "writing cabin" from a former writer/client on a remote island in Scotland. She feels Grady needs a quiet environment to produce his required novel, and the cabin might be just what he needs. She will sponsor him with her own money for a few months in hopes he can free himself from his block and produce a new book.

But once settled into the luxurious cabin Grady makes a discovery that might change his fortune, despite the far-ranging risks involved. While considering which path to follow, he begins to notice strange things about the island and its people. With no phone coverage, no internet, and not way of communicating with the non-island world, Grady soon feels an unease that makes him question his sanity.

All this happens in the first few pages, so I am not giving away the real plot that unfolds from this point. Alice Feeney is the master of her characters glimpsing things out of the corner of their eye, reading questions into seemingly ordinary situations, and misinterpreting everyday conversations. 

All this leads to a very tense, unputdownable story. It only reveals its secrets in the final pages, and even then there are several completely unpredictable revelations.

I really enjoyed letting this plot, characters, and environment engulf me completely. Pick it up if you like to follow a lead character experience confidence, questions, suspicion, anger, and uncertainty in his life among an unusual village full of quirky townspeople that he cannot quite figure out if they or he is crazy. 

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Feeney, Alice. Sometimes I Lie.   

A woman wakes from a coma without any memory of how she got there or anything about her past few months. She cannot talk or move, so people visiting her do now know she can hear them. Slowly from their conversations and foggy memories, she begins to piece together incidents that led to her hospitalization and current situation, and not everything she learns is positive. (Previously reviewed here.)

Happy reading.

Fred

 

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Cross My Heart

Collins, Megan. Cross My Heart. New York: Atria 2025. Print.

First Sentences:

 

Hi,

I've decided there's no way to begin this message that isn't either [1] creepy or [2] awkward, so I'm just going to dive right into the Creepy/Awkward Pool and hope I don't drown.

One year ago today, your wife saved my life. And it breaks my heart that, in order for me to live, she first had to die. 

Description:

OK, I'm only going to tell you the premise of Megan Collins' Cross My Heart and what happens on the opening few pages. That's all you're going to get because this is a genuine thriller with more red herrings and twisty-turns than Perseus and the Minotaur together couldn't put together. Any more details from me would only spoil your own adventure into this riveting story, one that I highly recommend.

Here's some nutshell details to get your interest peaked. Rosie Lachlan, the writer of the opening text message above, had received a heart transplant over a year ago. Somehow, she learned the identity of the anonymous donor: the wife of a local celebrity author who happens to live in Rosie's own suburban town.

With her opening letter to Morgan Thorne, the author, and the clever, bantering return message from him, Rosie dreams this man definitely could be the answer to the depression she endures after her fiancé broke up with her before her heart transplant.

I didn't think of surviving as something I'd do -- actively, with intention. I thought of it as something that may or may not happen to me, a think like the weather, completely beyond my control.

This all is in just the first few pages.

What author Collins so skillfully presents then is how this relationship between the heart recipient and the donor's widowed husband plays out. Despite warnings from her best friend, Nina, the email exchanges continue. Rosie obsesses over Morgan in her mind, walks her parents' dog past his house to possibly catch a glimpse of him, and even sees him while in a local coffee shop, debating in her mind a scenario where she could "accidently" bump into him to actually meet and talk with him. She researches everything about him from his writings to interviews to podcasts in order to learn everything about him.

But Rosie dismisses the few rumors about Morgan's relationship with his wife and how her accidental death might not have been what it seemed. Other characters enter Rosie's life, each one contributing a bit more information (good and questionable) about the man, but she keeps her dreams about a potential relationship with him secret.

Or does she? Is she really just dreaming about him or is she actually meeting him on the sly, away from her co-workers', friend's and parent's knowledge? And is Morgan the perfect man she learns about or someone else?

The risk seemed worth the reward.

You may think you can guess where this story is going, a kind of Play Misty for Me stalker tale that ends badly for the relationship. But I am here to tell you that Collins has a lot of surprises to spring on you throughout Cross My Heart at the most unexpected moments. Enough quirky plotlines that made me want to read this book straight through, trying to figure out what the next page would reveal.

That's it. Enough said on my part. I really loved this book and highly recommend it for its seemingly straightforward, if obsessive plot that halfway through turns everything on its head and doesn't let up until the very last page. 

Go get it and be entertained/duped/delighted in the most unexpected ways. Highest recommendation.

You have his wife's heart.....You can't have her life, too.

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Feeney, Alice. Sometimes I Lie.   

A woman awakens from a coma with no memory of how she got there. She can hear everything that is going on around her, but cannot move or otherwise respond. Visitors talk to each other about her situation and slowly she begins to piece together her history and remember ... but what she remembers may not really be what happened, nor the people around her who they say they are. Riveting. (Previously reviewed here)

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 450 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

The Girl With No Shadow

Harris, Joanne. The Girl With No Shadow. New York: HarperCollins 2007. Print.

First Sentences:

 

It is a relatively little-known fact that, over the course of a single year, about twenty million letters are delivered to the dead. People forget to stop the mail -- those grieving widows and prospective heirs -- and so magazine subscriptions remain uncancelled; distant friends unnotified; library fines unpaid....You can learn a lot from abandoned mail: names, bank details, passwords, e-mail addresses, security codes...A gift, as I said, just waiting for collection. 

Description:

Having enjoyed the film Chocolat with Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, I stumbled onto the novel Chocolat by Joanne Harris on which the movie was based. I was surprised to discover that there are three additional books about Vianne Rocher, chocolatier (chocolate maker) extraordinaire. While I am not usually attracted to books of fantasy and magic, I took the plunge into The Girl With No Shadow, the second in the series, just because I was curious to read what new adventures awaited the heroine and her daughter, Anouk, several years after the ending of Chocolat.

In Girl With No Shadow, Vianne, eleven-year-old Anouk, and four-year-old daughter Rosette, have set up a new chocolaterie in another tiny French village. We soon learn that they have fled from their previous city after the boatman Roux's boat was burned up. They have changed their names to Madam Yanne Chargonneau and Annie. The small, but growing chocolate shop they take over originally sold only pre-packaged chocolates, but when the owner died, Yanne/Vianne begain making her own delicacies, much to the delight of the townspeople.

Cooling [chocolate] acquires a floral scent; of violet and lavender papier poudre. It smells of my grandmother, if I'd had one, and of wedding dresses kept carefully boxed in the attic, and of bouquets under glass. 

Into their lives drifts the exotic woman, Zozie, who joins the shop as a helper and companion to Annie and her tiny sister Rosette while Yanne is cooking. But Zozie seems to have a hidden background and certainly some unusual talents with magical symbols and words which seem to attract customers and encourage them to eat. The chocolaterie becomes more popular and thus these outsiders become part of the tiny community.

Narrated in turn by the four individual characters, Zozie, Yanne, Annie, and even the mute Rosette, the plot slowly unfolds as somewhat ominous, like glimpsing a darting light out of the corner or your eye. Who exactly is Zozie and what is her purpose for befriending Yanne and Annie? Who are Yanne/Vianne and Anouk/Annie and why did they continue to roam the world and only temporarily settle down before moving on? Why is Rosette silent and underdeveloped for a toddler? And what about the villagers, especially the wealthy Monsieur Thierry, who owns the building with their apartment and chocolaterie, and who has a huge, slightly overpowering crush on Yanne? 

To be a mother is to live in fear. Fear of death, of sickness, of loss, of accidents,of strangers, or simply those small everyday things that somehow manage to hurt us most: the look of impatience, the angry word, the missed bedtime story, the forgotten kiss, the terrible moment when a mother ceases to be the center of her daughter's world and becomes just another satellite orbiting some less significant sun.

It's a dreamy, captivating, and slightly ominous book that certainly engrossed me from start to finish. It gives up its secrets behind the characters ever so slowly, sometimes confusing readers as to who exactly is narrating a particular chapter. While the writing style and pace may lull you. the plot and characters keep you alert right up to the frantically-paced end.

Everything comes home, my mother used to say; every word spoken, every shadow cast, every footprint in the sand. It can't be helped: it's part of what makes us who we are.

I really loved it and hope you will too.

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Harris, Joanne. Chocolat.   

First of four books about Vianne Rocher, the mysterious chocolatier, along with her daughter Anouk who blow into a small French town one windy day and create a wondrous chocolate shop. Vianne has the skill to predict what each townsperson's favorite chocolate delicacy is, choices which seem to cause changes in their lives. But her presence and personality somehow pose threats to others in the village. Wonderfully written with fascinating characters.

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 435 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

 

Whale Rider

Ihimaera, Witi. Whale Rider. New York: Harcourt. 1987. Print.

First Sentences:

In the old days, in the years that have gone before us, the land and sea felt a great emptiness, a yearning.


Description:

This first sentence in Witi Ihimaera's Whale Rider perfectly exemplifies what the book will bring to each and every reader: a dreamy tone, a personification of powerful elements, and an intriguing concept that those elements are somehow feeling unfulfilled. There is the teasing hint that this story will poetically describe the reasons behind the feeling of the land and sea, the journey to address this sadness, and the resolution, whatever that might be.

I was grabbed immediately by the writing. It reads as if you were eavesdropping on the retelling of an oral history of an ancient folk legend that was a key part of the Maori people and culture of New Zealand. I just settled into a comfy chair, curled up, and let myself be absorbed by the rich narration and the musicality of the Maori words sprinkled in. It seemed a privilege to overhear this story from the words of a master storyteller like Witi Ihimaera.

The sea had looked like crinkled silver foil smoothed right out to the edge of the sky....This was the well at the bottom of the world, and when you looked into it you felt you could see to the end of forever.

The story outlines two narratives. One, of the current life of the people of the coastal village of Whangara, New Zealand. It is guided by its ancestral leader, Koro Apirana, and his granddaughter Kahu. The second parallel story recounts the legend of Kahutia Te Rangi, the ancestral Whale Rider, who could talk with animals and, while astride the back of a huge bull whale, rode from the ancient grounds of Hawaiki to settle Koro's village of Whangara. The Whale Rider is said to return someday to re-establish the Maori culture that is fast being lost in the modern world.

The village leader, Koro Apirana, a descendent of founder Kahutia Te Rangi, is concerned that there is no male heir to take over his leadership role and preserve the Maori traditions. Only Kahu, his granddaughter and a girl, is a direct issue of his blood. But as a girl, Koro feels she is ineligible to fulfill that blood destiny. He rejects her love, bars her from his school where he teaches boys the Maori knowledge, and prays that his son and wife will give birth to another child, this one a male.

But Kahu has boundless love for her old Paka grandfather and sneaks around outside the school to learn for herself the Maoi lessons before being run off by Koro. She has a sensitivity to her environment and even seems to be intricately tapped into the Maori culture.

Maybe you saw the 2002 movie, Whale Rider, based on this book. While it's a visually stunning depiction of this story. But as is the case with every movie-from-a-book, the written tale is vastly superior. The details, conversation sprinkled with Maori words, the reverence for the legends, and the power of internal thoughts makes the book deeply involving. Still, I highly recommend watching the movie after reading the book as it gives viewers a beautiful image of the people, events, and elements. And hearing the Maori language spoken is wonderful.

I highly recommend this book for his poetic style, its familiarization of Maori culture, and its strong depiction of a people striving to understand the world and people they live with while trying to remain true to the ancient traditions and history of their culture.

 

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Goldsberry, Steven. Maui, the Demigod: An Epic Novel of Historical Hawaii   

Retelling the story of the Hawaiian gods, from the history of Maui, the Trickster. (Disclaimer: I met author Goldsberry in Hawaii while he was writing this, so wanted to give his fine book a plug. I found it a fascinating storytelling and a highly informative read. FR)

 

Go As a River

Read, Shelley. Go As a River. New York: Spiegel & Grau 2023. Print.

First Sentences:

He wasn't much to look at. Not at first, anyway.


Description:

It's an intriguing title to Shelley Read's debut novel: Go As a River. In this compelling story of a young woman's life in the tiny town of Iola, Colorado in the late 1940's and beyond, this phrase pops up to describe a way to survive and continue living:

I had tried...to go as a river, but it had taken me a long while to understand what that meant. Flowing forward against obstacle was not my whole story. For, like the river, I had also gathered along the way all the tiny pieces connecting me to everything else, and doing this had delivered me here, with two fists of forest soil in my palms and a heart still learning to be unafraid of itself.

Victoria Nash, a seventeen-year-old girl, lives with her father, uncle, and younger brother on their generational peach ranch, serving the men in her family and helping with the crops after the deaths of her mother, aunt, and older brother in a auto accident five years earlier. She has no dreams of another life or the world outside her home and nearby woods until a young stranger drifts through town...and she is smitten.

God will bring two strangers together on the corner of North Laura and Main and lead them toward love. God won't make it easy. 

The consequences of her love for this outsider drive the remainder of the story as she leaves her home and family to be with this young man. But soon the reality of life in that era intrudes on the couple's world and both young people and their lives are forever changed.

 

That's all I will reveal of the compelling plot. But please know this is a very special tale of choices, survival, love, and family as seen through the narrator's (Victoria's) eyes and senses. She is passionate about her family and the natural world that surrounds her, and works to nurture and preserve both by whatever means available to her strength and determination. Her voice is true and strong, whether describing her surroundings or contemplating her doubts and obstacles she faces in her present and future life.

The old house smelled like only old houses do, like stories, like decades of buttery skillet breakfasts and black coffee and dripping faucets, like family and life and aging wood.

This is completely Victoria's story, although other major characters are depicted with skill and honesty by author Read. It is a dreamy book in some ways, but always under laid with the reality of the challenging world surrounding this young girl and her later adult years.

I was completely caught up in Victoria and her world, her intense will to survive as well as her heartfelt doubts about whichever road she decides to take. read's prose is simple and clear as the orchard and woods Victoria inhabits, exactly setting the tone on both innocence and gritty determination.

He would teach me how true a life emptied of all but its essentials could feel and that, when you got down to it, not much mattered outside the determination to go on living. 

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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Doig, Ivan. The Whistling Season.   

A young, mysterious woman takes on work as housekeeper to a man and his sons on a small Montana farm. Along with her brother, she ingratiates herself into the family and community with long-reaching affects. Narrated by one of the young sons, it is a highly descriptive, delightful story of the people and events in a rural town. Absolutely one of the best books I have ever read. Highest recommendation.  (previously reviewed here)

 

She's Come Undone

Lamb, Wally. She's Come Undone. New York: Washington Square Press 1992. Print.

First Sentences:

In one of my earliest memories, my mother and I are on the front porch of our rented Carter Avenue house watching two deliverymen carry our brand-new television set up the steps. I'm excited because I've heard about but never seen television. The two men are wearing work clothes the same color as the box they're hefting between them. Like the crabs at Fisherman's Cove, they ascend the cement stairs sideways. Here's the undependable part: my visual memory stubbornly insists that these men are President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon.


Description:

Wally Lamb's debut novel, She's Come Undone, follows Dolores Price, a challenging narrator to say the least, from age four until early adulthood. She has more than her share of obstacles in life, including a father who deserts her to start a new life and family elsewhere; a mother who plies her with sweets and junk and eventually is admitted to a mental institution; and a strict grandmother who ends up raising her. Dolores deals with her world cynically and judgmentally from the confines of her bedroom until her depressed eating brings her weight to over 270 pounds. Although she is accepted into a college, this is her mother's dream, not hers, and she is reluctant to attend.

 

She does meet and retain several acquaintances and eventually a husband who assists her mentally and later financially. But really she meets the world alone, on her terms, and confidently chooses her own pathways.

Sounds depressing, huh? Well, it can be. But honestly, you just have to pull for Dolores amid all her troubles, both those inflicted on her by circumstances as well as those she pursues willingly to disastrous ends. You just have to stick with her and see how she can find a way to pull herself into the woman she has inside her, buried under layers of cynicism, doubt, fear, and false confidence.

 

Lamb is a captivating writer, a master of inner stream-of-consciousness narration, dialogue, and insightful depictions of characters. He keeps you reading page after page to see what new dilemma or person will come into Dolores' life that she will have to examine (often superficially), judge (usually harshly), and react to (angrily). Lamb makes readers feel the conflicts, fears, and hope of Dolores with every situation she finds herself thrown into.

I was fully invested in Dolores and this book for its honest presentation of a young girl coming of age, trying to find herself, and confronting the world and people she faces. It's a modern re-imagining of The Catcher in the Rye, but with a female lead who reveals herself and her angst much more clearly and empathically, in my mind, that Holden Caulfield ever did. 

[P.S. For another great coming of age novel, please read one of my favorites, Brewster by Mark Slouka (see below)]

 

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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Slouka, Mike. Brewster.   

My favorite coming of age book with four remarkable, memorable characters who loosely bond together and battle against their personal struggles as teens. A fine successor to The Catcher in the Rye. (previously reviewed here)

The Plague and I

MacDonald, Betty. The Plague and I. New York: Lippincott 1948. Print.

First Sentences:

Getting Tuberculosis in the middle of your life is like starting downtown to do a lot of urgent errands and being hit by a bus. When you regain consciousness you remember nothing about the urgent errands. You can't even remember where you were going. The important things now are the pain in your leg; the soreness in your back; what you will have for dinner; who is in the next bed.


Description:

Can a person have a deadly disease and write an in-depth memoir of the experience, yet keep a sense of humor in the narrative? Well, I'm here to tell you that Betty MacDonald's The Plague and I, does just that. 

It is a deeply personal, introspective, self-deprecating immersion into the journey through the world of serious illness that begins with her getting fed up with a recurring cough and feeling weak, several doctors' diagnosis (or lack thereof), then takes us through daily life a tuberculous sanitarium from a patient who just happens to be a gifted, humorous writer.

MacDonald is the author of The Egg and I which wittily documents her life with her husband on a chicken farm with no electricity and no running water. She is clearly a survival-type person who can still keep her sense of humor while experiencing outrageous conditions.

Our family motto was "People are healthy and anybody who isn't is a big stinker.

MacDonald's parents and siblings were all extremely healthy. Her father made the children run around the block and do calisthenics to music before breakfast every day (and chew each bite of food 100 times), and a weekly ice bath, even on freezing days when they lived in Montana.

But in the 1930s, divorced and the mother of small children, MacDonald contracts tuberculous, an extremely communicable disease which at that time was usually considered a death sentence. Treatments focused on absolute bed rest in a quiet place, to let lungs recover without exertion. That meant laying around in bed all day, usually in one position, with no reading, talking, reaching, sitting up, or walking without a nurse's permission and help.

So MacDonald begins her stay at The Pines sanatorium in upstate Washington and soon learns the rigorous routine and very strict rules enforced by the doctors and nurses (one fierce Charge Nurse she refers to as "Granite Eyes"). Any deviation from this behavior is considered being uncooperative and are grounds to be sent home (it was a sanatorium that accepted MacDonald and a few other patients free of charge).

The staff at The Pines had but one motivating factor -- to get the patients well. This motivating factor, like a policeman's nightstick, was twirled over our heads twenty-four hours a day....'We are going to make you well and the shortest distance between two points is a straight line,' we were told. 'Here is the line, either follow it or get out.'

That meant absolutely no deviation from the schedule and conditions that produced quiet. Day by day, truly hour by hour, MacDonald passes the time waiting for the next meal, whispering secretly to her roommates, having infrequent tests done (without her ever learning the results or any progress, good or bad), and trying to sleep during the twice daily 2-hour rest periods. Visitors were allowed for only a few minutes once a week, no more than three people at a time, and no children permitted. 

The night went on and on and on and I grew progressively colder and sadder. 'The one thing to be said in favor of life at The Pines,' I thought, as I tried futilely to warm a small new area at the bottom of the bed, 'it's going to make dying seem a like a lot of fun.'

I'm not making this memoir sound funny, I know, but believe me that MacDonald, although faced with many unfriendly people, restrictions, boredom and medical tests, retained her wry sense of the world and people around her. She records that her roommates offered her some wise words: "The first hundred years here are the hardest."

Being sent to an institution, be it penal, mental, or tuberculous, is no game of Parchesi, and not knowing when, or if, you'll get out doesn't make it any easier. At least a criminal knows what his sentence is.  

Not knowing how long she would be in the sanitarium, not ever being told whether her health was improving or getting worse, and living under the constant threat that to not follow the rules meant being sent home and her bed given to someone more willing to try to get well were challenges she faced daily. But overall, her memoir of the experience is a fascinating, entertaining, sobering, and wonderfully witty experience.

From my stay at The Pines I learned that a stiff test for friendship is: "Would she be pleasant to have t.b. with?"

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Diamond, John.  Because Cowards Get Cancer Too: A Hypochondriac Confronts His Nemesis.  

Times of London writer and admitted hypochondriac Diamond details with humor and fear his bout with throat cancer via his newspaper columns. (previously reviewed here)