Quick Lit: What I’ve Been Reading Lately

Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

Oh my goodness, this book. Structurally, it is a masterpiece in storytelling. (I returned to the opening page probably a dozen different times. It can be interpreted in a lot of ways, and I found my thoughts about it kept shifting the more I read.) The whole thing felt Shakespearean — both tragic and beautiful.

That first page I mentioned opens with a murder. But whose, exactly? And what led to it?

Here’s the premise: Beth and Frank are happily married. Two years before the book begins they lose their young son to an accident. Years before that a teenage Beth meets her first love, Gabriel, a young aristocrat in their country village. Months after Beth’s relationship with Gabriel abruptly ends, Frank and Beth marry. As the book opens Gabriel is back, newly divorced, and with a young son of his own. This sets a whole cascading story in motion.

One of my favorite reads of the year.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

This book has been described as “the greatest war novel of all time” and I 100% agree. The story opens with twenty-year-old German solider Paul Baumer and his classmates who enlisted to serve in WWI two years before. The boys (because that’s what they are) form unbreakable bonds. Slowly, as the story unfolds, one by one they meet their end. I found myself highlighting a number of quotes as I read:

Albert expresses it: “The war has ruined us for everything.” He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life.

We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation.

Life is simply one continual watch against the menace of death.

We have given up hope that someday an end may come. We never think so far.

Incredibly powerful and deeply moving. An unflinching look at war and its consequences. This book should be required reading for every human being.

Heartwood by Amity Gaige

I knew as soon as I saw Heartwood at Page 1 Books last spring that it was a novel for me. Valerie Gillis, a woman whose been hiking the Appalachian Trail for months, has gone missing. The book covers the days following her disappearance is told through excerpts from Valerie’s survival diary, police interviews with family members and fellow hikers, and narration from Bev, the Maine State Game Warden in charge of Valerie’s search, and Lena, a woman in an assisted living community who becomes invested in Valerie’s story. It’s a book about taking up space in the world, mothers and daughters, and what it means to be lost and found.

As a survival book fan, this story reminded me of a number of other books I’ve discussed here over the years: The God of the Woods for its female lead investigator in a missing person’s search, The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America’s Wildlands and The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, two non-fiction book that wow, were informative, and more recently the middle grade verse novel, The Trouble with Heroes, about a boy who hikes the Adirondack’s highest peaks.

What have you read lately?