The Book Nook Chronicles

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Author: Nora Ephron

Page Count: 179

Publication Date: January 1, 1983

Genre: Memoir

Author: Molly Shannon

Page Count: 304

Publication Date: April 12, 2022

This novel was the second read for my book club this year. We selected this book due to it having an unreliable narrator. And telling everyone you’re divorced when, in reality, you aren’t–like Amy Byler does–is pretty unreliable.

I decided to read this novel while on vacation with my husband, assuming based on the cover that it would be a good beach read. Let me just say, that is NOT what this book is. Sure, it’s got nerdy little literary and Latin puns, plus a idilic New York summer filled with a sweet romance, but the overall story in this book is heavy.

Amy Byler’s life is quite literally my personal nightmare. Her husband abandons her, a stay-at-home mom, with their two children to go find himself after they experience a personal tragedy together. She’s left to pick up the pieces. We find her lost, presented with an opportunity and the perfect circumstances to jump head first into an NYC adventure.

If you are a mother, an expecting mother, or want to be a mother, you should read this book. As someone who hopes to have children one day, this novel had me laughing, cry, and contemplating what the future may look like navigating parenthood. There is a very abrupt miscarriage thrown in near the end of this book, so if you’ve experience an MC please be forewarned. All in all, this book is a love letter to moms. It’s a reminder to women that you need to (and have the right to) continue celebrating yourself even once you have kids.

Oh, Iron Flame. I want to be on this bandwagon as much as everyone else, but I honestly find these books-while enjoyable-a little lackluster. I like them enough to have Onyx Storm on my TBR for this year, but kind of like Twilight, I find that there are a lot of stollen tropes within these books that have been overdone and the main characters to be a bit whiny.

I often refer to these books as a smutty Hunger Games meets How to Train Your Dragon, and I stand by that analogy through and through. On a serious note, I thought Zombie Jack (I just think Zombie Jack has a nicer ring to it) was a weird choice, but he definitely made for an impactful climax at the end of this read. I appreciated the dive into the scribes and the history of the dragons as well, seeing as Yarros’s world-building is the part that interests me the most.

If you’ve read Fourth Wing, you’ll definitely be saying “What the f*** just happened?” when you finish this read- the question is if it’s in a good way or a bad way. I’ll leave it up to you to decide.

If you’ve read my January round-up, you’ll know that I read Colm Tóibín’s sequel to Brooklyn at the start of this year and instantly put book one on my TBR after finishing it.

Reading these two books in the wrong order was definitely a choice. If I could turn back time and read them in the right order, I may have given this book a higher score than I did. I think the reason I only gave this book a 4 (which is a fairly decent score from me, I might add) was my true disappointment in Eilis. Throughout this novel, Tóibín builds her up as a driven and progressive woman who is going to beat the odds and become a college-educated career woman. And then he goes and has her settle for a man.

I could blame my hatred for Tony on the fact that I read Long Island first, but I remember finding him annoying when I watched the film adaptation of this book, so I think I just hate the character. I really despise how he pressured Eilis into marriage during her most vulnerable state and I also hate how she just goes along with it. Their relationship gave me the ick all around (Jim and Eilis forever).

If this novel teaches you anything, it should be that grief can completely blur a person’s judgement. I do think Tóibín does a beautiful job covering cultural issues from the 1950s like racial segregation and European immigration to the United States post-World War II. I found this book to be a celebration of the melting pot nature of New York City, but I left it just as disappointed as I was when I finished its sequel, Long Island.

Like the title of this self-help anthology suggests, this book will make you think.

The first few essays within this read truly humbled me. They made me question my approach to a lot of things like my own happiness, my interpretation of other people’s opinions, and if I allow my emotions to control too much of my day-to-day (spoiler alert, I probably do). The deeper I delved into the collection, the more repetitive it seemed, revisiting the concepts of self-acceptance, happiness, relationships, and the psychology of emotions.

I wish I could have gotten my hands on a physical copy of this book. It would have been so much better to jump around the essays–reading the ones that resinated with me the most first. (101 is a really marketable number, but at what cost?) As a whole, a majority of this work was effectively humbling and thought-provoking, which I think is kind of the point.

Like any collection of essays, there were hits and misses. If I had to recommend 5 out of the 101 inside, here are the ones I think you should read:

Essay 2: The Psychology of Daily Routine

Essay 40: Why Logical People Lead Better Lives in a Generation Where Passion is at a Premium

Essay 64: The Most Taboo Thing in Our Culture is Radical Honesty–And That’s Exactly the Problem

Essay 71: 18 Little Reminders for Anyone Who Feels Like They Don’t Know What They’re Doing with Their Life

Essay 91: The 15 Most Common Types of Distracted Thinking