When I recommend a book to you, it falls in one of three categories:
1. Loved—or liked a lot—and want to share because it’s so good or has interesting themes or is unusually rendered. Or has just truly lovable characters. (most common)
2. Loved so much I want to buy a copy and reread it. (couple times a year)
3. Loved so much I have the urge to immediately start it again. (very very rare)
This one falls into the elusive third category, a book so magnificent—a “beautiful, big-hearted treasure” to steal from Lily King’s blurb—that if you read only one book I recommend, please make it be this one.
It centers around three people, one of whom, Violet, is 22 and serving a prison sentence for manslaughter after a drunk-driving accident. Then there’s Harriet, who meets Violet while volunteering at the prison running a book club. Finally Frank, whose late wife is the woman Violet killed.
The intersections of their relationships makes this book truly magical. I’m not even sure I can fairly capture the beauty in this book—it’s about kindness, it’s about forgiveness, it’s about friendship, it’s about living with intention. And it’s done with a fascinating and unique POV, one that feels reflective instead of narrative. I’m sure I’ll pick up even more nuance in the second reading. I think, instead of trying to persuade you further, I’ll just quote from the very last page of the last chapter, which gives nothing away but sets the stage beautifully for the start:
“My life unfolded as most lives do, day upon day of doing my best and occasionally my worst, that human continuum…Even the most eventful life holds an avalanche of stories. Any one of mine would give you a fair impression of who I was and how I lived. But the one I chose…isn’t a story at all. It’s what Harriet would call the meanwhile, the important thing that was happening while the rest of the story moved along.”
For my fellow writer friends, a quote that landed so beautifully in my creative soul:
“The writer writes the words. The given reader reads the words. And the book, the unique and unrepeatable book, doesn’t exist until the given reader meets the writer on the page.”
