okiecozyreader's reviews
1121 reviews

I feel like this book reminds me of Sam Hell but a mystery. It is more violent at times (with a serial killer) and doesn’t shy away from tough topics (check triggers if you have them). I listened to the author in a chat and he said TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW is one of his favorite books. The same thread of friendship between two children who grow up and continue to care and look after the other runs through this book as well.

This book takes place largely in 1975 when these murders are happening. When Patch sees his friend targeted, he becomes the prey. His friend is determined to help find him. Then spanning most of the lifetime, we see the cause for justice and a conclusion to these horrible crimes.

The short chapters in this longer book kept me turning pages. I loved the references to his favorite childhood book, Where the Wild Things Are.

The pirate and the beekeeper
“…he’d take that morning still and purse it till the colors ran because he knew it could not have been so beautiful. That nothing was ever so beautiful in his life.” Ch 1

““There’s a place where the bees make purple honey.” He listened. “
The North Carolina Coastal Plain. The sandhills. No one knows for sure why they do it. But it’s real purple. It glows. It’s like proof, Patch. There’s magical things out there just waiting on you.” Ch 24

“I just wanted to show you that sometimes things survive despite the harshest of odds.” Ch 27

The lovers, the dreamers
“At ten years old he realized that people were born whole, and that the bad things peeled layers from the person you once were, thinning compassion and empathy and the ability to construct a future. At thirteen he knew those layers could sometimes be rebuilt when people” ch 39

Cops and robbers

“People talk about one life … one chance. But I reckon a single life is made up of a dozen or more roles and responsibilities. I can count the versions of myself like friend and foe. Mistakes are the detours that remind you of the true way, Saint. To love and be loved is more than can ever be expected, more than enough for a thousand ordinary lifetimes.” 114

The hunt
“The bad are the few, but often they shout louder than the many. Don’t mistake silence for weakness.” 124

“Do something meaningful. Or maybe just mean everything you do,” he said. 127

Fate
“Sometimes people reserve so much of themselves. It’s like saving a fine wine for an occasion that never materializes.” 159

The prisoner
“…she wondered at the price of trust, and the toll it took to offer it, and to betray it.” 236

“

For a long time, this book reminded me of Yellowface - the idea of someone writing a book based on someone else’s story. But then it becomes something else - a murder mystery of a family with awful secrets.

I thought it was a good book for bookish people. Jacob Finch Bonner wrote a popular novel, but has been in a slump since. To keep income coming in, he teaches at a not prestigious MFA program to help develop writers. He gets a student who has the perfect Plot. As much as Jacob dislikes the arrogant student, he has to agree. After the student leaves, he continues to think about the plot and what happened to the book. 

Throughout the book, we get pieces of the plot, CRIB. I listened to audio and didn’t quite piece it together and I had to go back with the physical book and read CRIB. 

Looking forward to seeing where the story continues in the sequel. I figured out who was behind it all, but the ending still surprised me a little!

This was a fun Labor Day read. It is short and as a mother in mid-life, it felt relevant to my thoughts on summer vacation. I haven’t ever been to Cape Cod (but we have been to Martha’s Vineyard and Newport a couple of times) and I loved the vibe of this annual summer tradition… including the making of sandwiches for the beach. I thought it was apropos how the main character also identified as being in the sandwich generation - between her parents and her children.

The book takes place over the length of the week and shows what unfolds each day of the week.

It isn’t just a saccharine book of memories. Rocky also remembers some difficult pregnancies and lost pregnancies (be aware of triggers) as she considers her children and her marriage.

There were so many quotes I loved from this book:

“They’ve been coming here for so many years that there’s a watercolor wash over all of it now: Everything hard has been smeared out into pleasant, pastel memories of taffy, clam strips, and beachcombing. Sunglasses and sunscreen and sandy feet pressed against her thighs and stomach. Little children running across the sand with their little pails. Her own parents laughing in their beach chairs, shrinking inside their clothes as the years pass. They’ve been coming here for so many years that there’s a watercolor wash over all of it now: Everything hard has been smeared out into pleasant, pastel memories of taffy, clam strips, and beachcombing. Sunglasses and sunscreen and sandy feet pressed against her thighs and stomach. Little children running across the sand with their little pails. Her own parents laughing in their beach chairs, shrinking inside their clothes as the years pass.” P1

“It’s so crushingly beautiful, being human,” the mother sighs, and the daughter rolls her eyes and says, “But also so terrible and ridiculous.” And maybe it’s all three. This one week.” Ch 1

“But first: the epic making of the sandwiches! I complain about this part of my vacation life, but I love it, and everybody knows this.” Ch 4

“I would pick this life too, I know. I’d even pick the way that pain has burnished me to brightness. The pain itself, though? I imagine I’d give it up if I could.” Ch 4

So my life with a teenager! 
“There might be Laffy Taffy wrappers and Dorito bags on every surface when you wake up in the cottage, a whiff of something funky in the air that maybe isn’t only hormones and sweat. Is it weed? Is it an actual skunk? Nobody knows.” Ch 5

“It’s so annoying the way women have to do all the hard things and take care of everybody and pay attention to everything all the time. And then be soft and open and f***able. It’s infuriating!” Ch 8

“Menopause feels like a slow leak: thoughts leaking out of your head; flesh leaking out of your skin; fluid leaking out of your joints. You need a lube job, is how you feel. Bodywork. Whatever you need, it sounds like a mechanic might be required, since something is seriously amiss with your head” ch 15

“I want to behave badly and be immediately forgiven. Or maybe it’s not that I want that—it’s just what I do.” Ch 15

“We just keep showing up for each other. Even through the mystery of other people’s grief. What else is there?” Ch 16

“Why do we love everyone so recklessly and then break our own hearts? And they don’t even break. They just swell, impossibly, with more love.” Ch 25

“But grief was like a silver locket with two faces in it. I didn’t know what the faces looked like, but it was heavy around my neck, and I never took it off.” Ch 28

“I make a mental note to rearrange my heart—to make a little more room for the changing realities.” Ch 38

“And this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel. To say, Same. To say, I understand how hard it is to be a parent, a kid. To say, Your shell stank and you’re sad. I’ve been there.” Ch 39

“Maybe grief is love imploding. Or maybe it’s love expanding. I don’t know. I just know you can’t create loss to preempt loss because it doesn’t work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it’s your last resort, because it is.” Ch 43

I really liked things about this book - it is an interesting idea - Phoebe checks into a dreamy hotel to commit suicide. Her marriage ended, she was unable to get pregnant and she has wallowed in her grief to the point it is unbearable. Little does she know, the rest of the hotel was booked by a wedding party and the bride is not going to allow anything - including this guest - to ruin her special week. 

It’s so funny how the author describes “the wedding people” throughout the book. But that is, in fact, what they are - all the people who came for this wedding.

The book fluctuates from this present story to the past, where we learn about her marriage, infertility and her job as a professor. 

At times, I became indifferent to what was happening, but I did enjoy the story overall.

Chapter 1
“…Phoebe begins to realize just how many wedding people there are in the lobby. It’s unsettling, like in that movie The Birds her husband loved so much. Once she spots a few, she sees them everywhere. Wedding people lounging on the mauve velvet bench. Wedding people leaning on the built-in bookcase. Wedding people pulling luggage so futuristic it looks like it could survive a trip to the moon.”

“…when her therapist asked her to close her eyes and describe her happy place, she pictured herself on that canopy bed because she could only imagine herself happy in a place she had never been, a bed she had never slept in.”

“There is no such thing as a happy place. Because when you are happy, everywhere is a happy place. And when you are sad, everywhere is a sad place.”

Chapter 8
“…...how unpredictable it is, how things can change in an instant.
One moment she could be wondering what to make her husband for dinner, and the next moment he could walk into the room and tell her he is in love with with someone else. But it is also true that one day she can be alone in a room preparing to die, and the next, she can be preparing to be on a boat with beautiful strangers.”

Chapter 11
“…the loneliest girl in the world, just like Phoebe. And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. just ? what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. Maybe everybody sits up at night and creates arguments in their head for why they are the loneliest person in the world.”

Ch 17

"Your husband is not going to take care of you the way you think, … Nobody can take care of you the way you need to take care of yourself. It's your job to  take care of yourself like that."

“How did [Weddings] get so big, come to be so important, that a woman couldn't see her way out of it? That a woman would sacrifice her entire life for it?”

Ch 24
“You can live long enough, go through enough, and learn how to stop trusting yourself."

“It is much easier to sit in things and wait for something to save us.”

This is my first book by Powers and I feel like maybe it was a good place to start. I really liked the start of the book - the relationship of a child with a behavior disorder somewhere on the spectrum and his father (after the tragic loss of the mother). The father wants to avoid medicating his son, so he submits him to the care of a practitioner whose goal it is to change the way he thinks through a reasoning brain “game.”

I was really interested where the book would go from this point. Being an educator, I think about students like Robin and wonder what is the best way to help them.

It’s a little sci fi, with a message about the condition of the earth, nature and empathy. When it got to this part, I felt like it was at times more heavy handed.

I went back and watched Oprah’s interview with the author on Apple plus. (It’s interesting he doesn’t have internet connection and has to go somewhere to do zooms, etc). The discussion about the title was interesting - based on Plato’s Cave - “The eye knows two kinds of bewilderment- coming into the light and out of the light”
This is a story about a little boy who goes into and out of the light - and both processes are bewildering.

I could see comparisons to Flowers for Algernon and at times, it reminded me of Ted Chiang.

“Imagine a planet where the past never went away, but kept happening again and again, forever. That’s the planet my nine-year-old wanted to live on.”

“In the face of the world's basic brokenness, more empathy meant deeper suffering.”

“He'd discovered, on his own, what formal education tried to deny: Life wanted something from us. And time was running out.”

“The world had become something no schoolchild should be allowed to discover.”

“And you always say, an experiment with a negative result isn't a failed experiment.
"No," l agreed. "You can learn a lot from negative results."

Which do you think is bigger?
Outer space ...? Or inner space?

Cat is a very business minded professional who has a night with a guy who isn’t very pleasant (Steve) and ends up pregnant (not sure if this is a spoiler, it happens pretty quickly in the book). Soon after, she gets a call from her sister needing help at their family’s camp in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, because her name is on the deed and they are having financial trouble. She goes, several months pregnant, and finds out that Steve wants to bulldoze the camp to create a waterpark. The camp manager disappears with his sleazy girlfriend (and possibly what is left of the camp’s money and supplies for an upcoming fundraiser). Cat, her sister, and the camp team try to make the fundraiser happen with limited funds to save the camp.

I didn’t feel like the pregnancy track really was necessary (could they have just had the night?), because it wasn’t really discussed much at camp (no one asked who the father was or why he wasn’t around). I think Steve could have had the same role minus the pregnancy and I would have liked it better.
He just really creeped me out!

“It was as if she were on one side of a soap bubble, and if she wasn’t careful, it would pop and she’d be inside it all again.” Ch 8

“The trust she had in Bob, that he wouldn’t let her down. What would that be like to have in life? Blind Faith, a Comfort and a Cross: The Ginger McCarthy Story.” Ch 16

“These woods, they’d seen it all before, and she could swear the trees whispered, Cat, failure is the chance to begin again.” Ch 24

“Money is a renewable resource. Family, truly caring people, are not,…” ch 34

“This camp for anxious and depressed adults run by anxious and depressed adults was finished. Bummer Camp indeed.” Ch 41

This third book in the Indiana Summers series tells the story of Berkley, the pet shelter (The Love Shack) manager and the hot new tshirt shop owner, Lawson. Both are from the same small town, where Berkley had a horrible event happen in her life that she is trying to move on from. We also get to know Oliver (who works at the restaurant in THE LITTLE FLOWER SHOP) and Lark (also new to town and a hairstylist) more. 

Both characters in the first two books were animal people and involved with what became Berkeley’s Love Shack. The dogs also have a lot of time in this book.

Many characters continue over the series. I loved seeing Yardley (from book 1) quite a bit, Betty Cemetery (the matron of the town, whose family founded it), and Kathleen (the mannequin that the town dresses up and puts in front of businesses and events).

“Remember the hard times? You’ll have more, believe me. Some worse, some not as bad. All are worth remembering for the lessons we learned, or the trials we overcame. You know how strong you are because you got through it and you’re still a wonderful person.”
…
“If you forget the bad times, then you forget the good times that were woven around them,…” 
…
“We can’t pick and choose the parts of our past that look the prettiest to our memories. We can move on from them. We can get over the rough times and celebrate the good times. But forgetting them completely is never the way.” Ch 5

Shea had some life rules (mostly about marriage), including one that refuses an heirloom ring, because she wouldn’t know if the past held any bad mojo. When she is proposed to with an heirloom ring, she questions if her husband really knew her, and what the history of her ring holds. She goes on a search to find out more.

3.5 rounded up
Emily is tired of everyone describing her as perfect, but she, and pretty much everyone else in this book is perfect. 

“You really are. Your flowers are perfect, and you’re perfectly nice, and even now, you look perfectly beautiful.” Ch 1

They are all gorgeous and kind and helpful and all the things. This, at times, was a little much for me - I also kind of wish ALL the relationships in the book didn’t immediately work out and end up perfect. But, I did enjoy this happy little book during a week that was mentally tough. It is somewhat refreshing to just have a bunch of kind people to read about whenever the world seems hard. 

Spice 2 🌶️ / 5 - most scenes are closed door but maybe one more open

“And she, imperfect Emily Lucretia, Hashtag The Flower Lady, now wanted it all.” Ch 14

“Turn the tables. Don’t let anyone get the better of you. It can only bother you if you let it.” Ch 15

Wine People gave me so much information about the behind the scenes, cut throat world of wine importing.

Alternating between the perspectives of two women in the company, Wren and Thessaly, along with the men in the company are put to a challenge of who will be promoted in the company, in a succession plan. Their backgrounds are very different and the urge to compete is obvious, but what would happen if they worked together? The friendship part of this story was my favorite part!

“A partner was not solely a burden to manage, or an observer to impress at close range. A partner could see things she didn’t. A partner could be calming, as if she knew exactly what Wren was thinking.” Ch 13

“She saw his flash of pleasure at seeing her, then the weariness, then the reluctance. She saw the moment he decided to speak to her.” Ch 14

“What did you do when your friendship faltered? You didn’t go to friend counseling.” Ch 18