Happy National Cookie Day!

Alas, I have not eaten any cookies (yet). I shouldn’t eat cookies anyway, since I’m trying to lose weight, which isn’t going well, though I have been more conscious of choosing healthier options. December is a tough month in that regard, though it wasn’t in the past when I had more willpower and less of a social life. My back feels better today, so there’s no longer an excuse not to be more active, except for laziness. 

I finished my December (in-person) book club novel The Christmas Bookshop by Jenny Colgan, and I hated it. Gave it two stars because… well, idk why. One just seemed too mean. It is the season of joy after all. The first issue with TCB is that I dislike the main character Carmen. She’s annoying and whiny, has caused her own problems by deliberately screwing up her exams so she couldn’t go on to higher education, and now is envious of anyone successful, especially her sister Sofia, who is an attorney married to another attorney. Carmen’s envy consumes her to the point where she refuses to have any relationship with her nieces and nephew (until she does yada). Sofia is irritating too, as is the nanny Skylar, who is just a ridiculous stereotype of a self-obsessed, health food and yoga freak. Sofia’s husband is conveniently absent until the end.

Carmen spends a chunk of the book obsessing over this awful narcissistic writer until she finally sees the light and realizes she’s in love with the nice teacher guy. Of course, a series of stupid mishaps keeps them apart until the very last second when she has to chase after him in a blizzard before his flight back to Brazil or wherever. There’s also a convoluted subplot involving the weird reclusive elderly owner of the bookshop and his secret past of having been fathered by a Nazi prisoner in a POW camp near Edinburgh. What? I don’t know. OK, fine, I just googled Scotland/WW2 and learned some things. It happens!

Last, but certainly not least, is the horrible muddy narrative where at certain points the reader can’t tell whose POV is in play. Head hops abound throughout the book, as if we’re reading one of those Russian novels from last century. Blech. You can tell that I’m just gonna be a bundle of laughs when we discuss TCB at our holiday tea party next week. I’m making egg salad sandwiches, btw.

But then! But then I read this incredibly beautiful and sad Kindle short story called The Princess of Valencia by Susan Straight and gave it five stars. It’s about a mother’s grief after her daughter is shot and killed at school, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking. This is an up close and personal story with the mom reading her daughters’s text messages and remembering events from the near and far past. It’s not linear, which is fine, because neither is grief. 

“We never knew who would shoot us because our sons were camouflaged as our sons.”