CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS by Sally Rooney

Two 21-year-old women who do poetry readings, Frances and Bobbi, meet Melissa, a photographer, and her husband Nick, a very handsome but not particularly famous actor.  The novel seldom diverges from interactions among these four people, except for the inner thoughts of Frances, the first-person narrator.  Frances and Bobbi were lovers at one time, but now they are just very good friends.  Frances develops a crush on Nick, who is twelve years older than Frances, which blossoms into her first sexual relationship with a man.  Her guilt is assuaged by the fact that Nick and Melissa no longer share a bed and don’t seem to have a very close marriage.  Although Nick and Frances communicate regularly online and in person, neither is able to express their feelings about the relationship, partly because neither seems to have a clue about what their feelings are.  Frances tries to shield herself from becoming too attached to Nick by making flippant and sometimes hurtful remarks to him.  I just wanted these two to start being honest with each other for a change and for Frances to stop vacillating about whether she cares about Nick or not.  Obviously, Nick is equally to blame, since he never feels secure in their relationship and is ambivalent about his marriage.  Frances also chooses not to open up to Nick or Bobbi when health and money issues arise.  These side plots don’t really distract from the main issue at hand, but, of course, plot is not a high priority in any of Sally Rooney’s novels.  Still, she somehow holds the reader’s attention with characters who don’t seem to be able to make up their minds. 

ALL FOURS by Miranda July

Our unnamed first-person narrator is a fairly well-known 45-year-old multimedia artist who refers to her child with gender-neutral pronouns.  She’s a creative, progressive thinker and becomes even more so as the plot develops.  Her tale begins with a planned three-week trip in which she will drive from Los Angeles to New York and back.   However, she stops at a motel in Monrovia and remains there until her scheduled return home, all the while giving her husband false and sparse details about experiences on a route that she has not actually traveled.  She meets a handsome thirty-year-old man named Davey and employs his wife to remodel her motel room.  Ok, this scenario is ludicrous, but the narrator has money to burn, so why not?  She is also helping this young couple fund their nest egg, even as she becomes friendly with Davey, who offers to show her around town.  When he takes his shirt off during a hike, her sexual attraction to him goes full throttle, and things go from heated to steamy in a hurry.  The visceral, lusty first half of this novel held my rapt attention, but the plot cools down significantly in the second half and becomes more about the narrator having to grapple with two issues.  One is the anticipated loss of her libido during perimenopause, and the other, naturally, is the precarious state of her marriage.

ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK by Chris Whitaker

I loved the beginning and ending of this book, but the middle gets bogged down in the mire of a relentless quest, funded by robbing banks.  I think 100 pages could be shaved with no detrimental impact to the plot.  Anyway, it’s an epic saga that involves a 13-year-old boy with one eye, nicknamed Patch, who intervenes when a beautiful girl his age is in the process of being abducted.  Instead, Patch gets stabbed and disappears.  Patch’s mother is an alcoholic who could barely cope before Patch vanished, but Patch’s best friend, a girl named Saint, refuses to believe that Patch is dead.  She regularly engages with the police department, particularly Chief Nix, to ensure that the search for Patch continues.  There are more than a few serendipitous coincidences, plus another that could be deemed unfortunate, depending on your perspective.  For some reason I did not mind the huge role that luck played in this novel, but some other aspects were a bit outlandish.  For example, a boy suddenly becomes a talented artist, despite having never previously shown any interest in painting, and recreates a town on canvas with a high degree of exactitude, strictly from a verbal description.  Love in many forms is an important theme here, as is evil in the form of a couple of characters that brought to mind Eric Rudolph.  Vengeance plays a role as well and exacts a high price.

HEARTWOOD by Amity Gaige

If you’re thinking of hiking the Appalachian Trail, this book might change your mind.  Valerie is a nurse who has taken on the upper half of the trail in order to repair her soul after witnessing so many patients dying from Covid.  In Maine, nearing the end of her trip, she fails to meet up with her husband at their rendezvous point.  Bev is a 6-foot-tall game warden in her 50s who is heading up the search for Valerie.  She has battled misogyny in her job for her entire career, but the battle to find Valerie is wearing on her even more, as she has to report the lack of progress each day to Valerie’s husband and parents.  The third woman in this story is Lena, a wheelchair-bound retired scientist in a senior-living facility who at first thinks the missing hiker could be her daughter.  When she finds out otherwise, she continues to ponder Valerie’s whereabouts, along with a young man with whom she chats on social media.  Valerie’s story is told through a journal that she claims keeps her sane, but in order to lighten her pack she has previously jettisoned the tracking device that would have made the search for her quite easy.  At times I felt that this novel should have been named Heartbreak instead of Heartwood, as Valerie’s situation becomes more and more dire and Bev’s exasperation becomes increasingly palpable.  Even Lena becomes so exasperated that she destroys her computer in a temper tantrum.  As for Valerie, we ultimately find that her altruism is not always well placed, especially when self-preservation is at stake.