All We Ever Wanted- Emily Giffin

It's fitting that Emily Giffin's All We Ever Wanted is set in Nashville, as that's where I was living when I first fell in love with her books. I hadn't even read this book's inside flap before I began it; as soon as I saw her name on the spine, I added it to my stack of books, so the setting was actually a surprise when I began reading it while waiting for my son's school play to begin (I managed to read 55 pages while we waited. My son was ushering and had to be there early, so hey, free reading time for Mom).

Nina Browning is living the good life. Ever since her husband Kirk sold his tech company for an obscene price, money has been no object for any of the Brownings, including their seventeen year-old son Finch. Nina knows things have changed since they joined the ranks of Nashville's uber-elite- her marriage, especially- but things are still good. Finch has gotten into Princeton, and maybe next year she and Kirk will be able to get back on track. But when word comes to Nina that Finch has made a terrible decision, one that has consequences not just for himself, but for others at his exclusive private school, Kirk's reaction to it will have Nina questioning everything she thought she knew.

Tom Volpe has been struggling to raise his daughter Lyla alone for years, ever since his unreliable wife left them when Lyla was young. And it hasn't been easy, especially on a carpenter's salary, even if her scholarship pays the majority of her tuition to Windsor Academy. When Lyla comes home drunk from a party and Tom sees the pictures on her phone, he knows he needs to make some heads roll...but that's easier said than done in a community like Windsor's, and with a daughter like Lyla.

Lyla Volpe didn't mean to get quite so drunk at that party, and that picture really wasn't a big deal, especially since she's liked Finch Browning for, like, forever. Besides, like he said, it wasn't him who took it. Can't everyone just back off and stop trying to ruin her life? Lyla's got some hard lessons to learn, lessons that may come at someone else's expense.

This was good. Ms. Giffin absolutely nails the disdainful attitude some of Nashville's filthy rich have towards regular people (I had the distinct displeasure of being acquainted with some of those people through another friend- who is nothing like them and is an absolutely wonderful person!- and found nothing impressive about them whatsoever). Their nose-wrinkling dismissal at anything they suspect of being even somewhat liberal, their certainty that throwing money at any problem will solve it instantly, their lack of interest in anyone's feelings but their own are all things I've seen in action (and it's horrifying; I think this kind of thing seems over-the-top and slightly unbelievable unless you've actually witnessed it. One Goodreads review referred to 'caricatures rather than characters,' and I completely understand how one might see that. It's something I would've thought as well before having witnessed it myself. Unfortunately, having lived in this area and seen some of the behavior of the type of people Ms. Giffin was trying to portray, I can't be so dismissive), and I was pleased to see exactly how well this novel covered these attitudes.

The multiple narratives worked well in this book in order for the reader to understand every side of the story. Lyla could be frustrating in her minimization of Finch's behavior, but I felt that it was an honest portrayal of a teenager who just wanted the situation to blow over and for things to go back to normal. Overall, I think this is a well-written novel that raises a lot of questions: how far will we go to protect the ones we love? How much does money change things, and how much should we let it? Everything may wrap up a little too nicely at the end for some readers, but these days, with so much turmoil in the world, a nicely-wrapped ending is exactly what I'm looking for, and this book fit just what I needed to read at the time.

There is discussion of sexual assault and rape in this story, though neither is graphic.

In front of the Nashville Parthenon (in 2010), which appears in the book.

It's always fun for me to read a book set somewhere I've lived, and Ms. Giffin did a great job with this setting. Several years ago, I read a book set in Nashville that had so many easy-to-verify errors that it was laughable. (I even paused to read a sentence out loud to my husband about one of the main characters pulling up and parking directly in front of a certain business, at which my husband blinked and said, "You can't park there!" To which I replied, "THANK YOU!") It's definitely a danger of setting a story in a place you don't live, but fortunately, I didn't notice any of those kinds of errors in this novel.

Do you enjoy reading books set in places you've lived or have spent time? 

Visit Emily Giffin's website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

Beartown- Fredrik Backman

Beartown by Fredrik Backman is a book I've seen popping up over and over again on the blogs lately (mostly in photos with other books, as luck would have it); it wasn't until someone posted a full review that I realized the book centered around a town's hockey team. My son and I are big hockey fans (can you be anything else, living this close to Chicago? Let's just not talk about how the Blackhawks have been doing lately, though...), and I've developed a love for hockey books, so even though I had approximately nine million other books to read at the time, I still grabbed this from a display at the library last week. And my goodness, I'm so glad I did.

Beartown is the story of a washed-up, nothing town deep in the woods. Everyone says the town is finished; there's hardly anything there anymore except a winning junior hockey team that has no right to be as good as it is. If they can win big this year, maybe this town can come back; maybe that new hockey school will be built there and the commerce will follow it. The hopes and dreams of an entire town, not to mention its future economy, lie on the shoulders of these young hockey players.

A terrible incident at a party after the semi-finals will change everything, pitting neighbor against neighbor, teammate against teammate, forcing everyone to make decisions about truth, justice, and loyalty. It's not just Beartown's future that hangs in the balance; it's everyone who lives there.

This was riveting. Fredrik Backman delves deeply into human nature and presents the reader with characters who are relatable, recognizable as our friends, neighbors and family, even as they make terrible decisions that harm other people. His ability to weave a story that incorporates so many characters, so many points of view, is on par with Stephen King (whose narratives from The Stand and It are some of my absolute favorite pieces of writing; despite the length, I've read each of these multiple times throughout my life). There's violence in this story, but it's never gratuitous nor designed to shock, and having sworn off reading more Pat Conroy novels due to the graphic nature of some of his scenes, I appreciated that.

I very much enjoyed this, blowing through it in less than twenty-four hours, and I see there's a second in the series, Us Against You. I'd love to hear your thoughts if you've continued on and have read this. I'm definitely interested in reading more from Fredrik Backman; I'd never heard of him until I started seeing A Man Called Ove all over the place, so I'm surprised to see how many books he's written. All the more for me to read!

Beartown does contain a rape scene, and what follows is what I think most women know to expect from humanity in general after something so terrible is made public: the doubts, the anger and threats towards the victim, people siding with the accused rapist. Knowing this, be kind to yourself and choose another book if you need to.


Visit Fredrik Backman's website here.

Follow him on Twitter here. (He tweets in both English and Swedish; I have a moderate level of Norwegian and can understand a lot of what he writes, although to me, Swedish looks like Norwegian spelled wrong. ;) )