My review of Fredrik Backman's novel, My Friends

 

Fredrik Backman’s novel, My Friends, broke my heart and opened my eyes. What a poignant story! Backman’s story explores loyalty—both loving, encouraging loyalty, and fear-fueled, evil-hiding loyalty. The story behind a famous painting exposes a vast sea of natural human responses to life’s challenges. Backman sprinkles nuggets of wisdom throughout. The ones about encouragement and art resonated most with me.

 

After a most delightfully creative chance meeting, timid, professorial, middle-aged Ted and street-smart, unfiltered, teenage Louisa embark on a train ride during which they get to know each other. Provoke and protect each other, too. The unlikely pair have some close calls as they transport Ted’s best friend’s very valuable painting cross-country. Ted wants Louisa to know about the three tiny figures sitting on an ocean pier in his friend’s painting, and about the artist, since she has a gift for artistic expression herself.

 

Backman’s clear delineation of characters in their dialogue and actions is brilliant. Ted reminisces about the artist’s and his families and friends back when they were young teens, but my favorite relationship was Ted’s and Louisa’s. Her blunt, often funny, observations surprise Ted at every turn. Both learn and grow during this train trip.

 

Their growing connection and the longstanding childhood friendships are heartening to read. These kids really had each other’s backs. Painful to read, however, is the riptide of violence flowing through these teens’ lives. How much physical bullying they endured, the blood and cruelty, shocked me. And bloody beatings by fathers.

 

Yet—against this backdrop of violence, the friends emerged hopeful and able to create and to love within humanity’s realities. If friends’ challenges to support the artist’s painting his masterpiece showcase the loyalty of friendship, bullying and beatings showcase cowardice as a type of loyalty. When Joar’s (one boy) mom was brutally beaten for the umpteenth time and the dad’s coworkers gathered outside their house, Ted remembers “the longest, most unbearable silence he has ever experienced. … Those men from the harbor would have to bear an eternal shame, all friends of men like Joar’s old man have to do that.” [page 373] Page 374 is the best explanation I’ve read about how all kinds of abuse get covered up. We all have that cowardly loyalty in us.

 

My Friends is an engaging and powerful novel. Most anyone would be richer for reading it.

 

Here are some of my favorite nuggets:

“Adults often think that self-confidence is something a child learns, but little kids are by their nature always invincible, it’s self-doubt that needs to be taught.” [pages 79 and 80]

“You know what Mom always says? You can be whatever you want to in life, as long as you don’t become a critic! Not of other people, and not of yourself. It’s so easy to be a critic, any coward can do that. But art doesn’t need critics, art has enough enemies already. Art needs friends.” [page 194]

“Great art is a small break from human despair …” [page 195]

“The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else’s belief in them.” [page 361]

My review of The Bird Hotel by Joyce Maynard

 

What a lovely novel! In Joyce Maynard’s The Bird Hotel, American Irene suffers multiple tragic losses from childhood into young adulthood. Numb with grief and believing happiness will never find her, wanting only to disappear, she makes a series of questionable but colorful transportation choices and ends up in Central America. Arriving with no money, she is welcomed at a lakeside hotel that has seen better days. 

 

The hotel owner senses this lost soul’s sorrowful despair and does not press her for details. Instead, she tells Irene her own stories. She has led a fascinating life. Soon her stories morph into Irene’s own stories of her new life in this hotel near a small village. Many of the stories are human interest in nature, but many more are personal to Irene. She learns to ride new waves of love and loss with equanimity. Irene’s situation is cross-cultural. She and the villagers speak different languages, but she always finds common ground in their humanity.

 

Maynard presents villagers and hotel staff and guests with such warmth, I grew to care about some. And oh, did I love Irene’s simple, generous heart. This novel is not just a relaxing tea in the lush gardens of the hotel, however; plenty of high drama happens. And Irene never fails to inspire. The Bird Hotel is a true beauty from ashes story, the best novel I've read in a long time.

The Page Turner by Viola Shipman ~ my review

In The Page Turner, a novel by Viola Shipman, literary family, Phillip and Piper Page and young-adult daughters Jess and Emma, whip wits against each other—until they realize family loyalty is the only thing that will save them from ruin at the hands of a predatory villain. In the meantime, they argue with each other about the value of romance novels versus serious literature, the value of high society versus life’s simple pleasures, and their trust versus mistrust of various literary agents. Emma, especially, takes on her family over how women are portrayed in fiction, and the importance of protecting her grandmother’s literary legacy. Emma is repelled early-on by the oily contempt of eventually revealed villain, but it takes the rest of this novel for her to figure out why this slithering snake has the power to destroy her family.

 

Because the Page family are all in the publishing business, their arguments take readers inside today’s publishing practices and trends. I liked this aspect! Publishing details are sufficient to bore, however, if this is not an interest of yours. Another enjoyment for me was the setting. In the beginning of this novel, beach, bluffs, and lighthouse descriptions transported me to one of my all-time favorite places, South Haven, Michigan. Then on Page 60, I read: “These are sounds of a South Haven summer.” The Pages split their time between New York and Michigan, but whenever they were in Michigan, I felt right at home. Dialogue in The Page Turner is unrealistically clever, but being a word nerd, I decided to let the intelligentsia have their repartee while I simply relaxed and enjoyed the word play.