David Yoon
Alicia Berenson is convicted of brutally murdering her fashion photographer husband. She is rendered complete mute when she is discovered next to the body of Gabriel who has been shot 5 times in the face. Silent throughout her trial she eventually finds herself remanded to a secure psychiatric unit called the Grove. This is where criminal psychotherapist Theo Faber, determined to help, finds her.
I don't read a lot of thriller but enough that I like to play along. The written form has proven immensely malleable and has given us some inventive takes in the genre. Here, Michaelides gives us an abundance of red herrings, more than a handful of likely suspects with plausible motives, (seriously, Alicia needs to find a better class of friends and acquaintances) some diary entries, and references to the tragedy of Alcestis from the ancient Greek playwright Euripides. You know with the economy of characters someone here is not what they seem and it's fun fitting different theories to the story as it progresses. This left me guessing til the very end and having a page-turning blast along the way.
Back in the mid 2000's there was a small Mennonite outpost in Boliva where the women were waking up in a daze, their bedsheets soiled with blood, dirt and semen. Naturally they were dismissed as crazy, or at the very least guilty of some sort of adulterous behaviour. But the women began talking and soon it was clear it was happening to dozens of others. Demons! A plague from God! What are you going to do?
It wasn't until two men were caught breaking into a neighbours house, armed with a veterinarian spray used to anesthetize cows were the women taken seriously. The men promptly named names and 9 men were arrested.
Miriam Toews takes that as a jumping off point for her latest novel where the women in her imagined Mennonite community are faced with the return of the guilty men in 48 hours. The women are ordered to forgive the rapists lest their souls be damned to hell, and the women responsible for damning them would be judged in the eyes of God and would have to be excommunicated. The women are faced with a decision: Do Nothing, Stay and Fight, or Leave.
A timely and incredibly powerful read that explores how these women fight for the right to be heard in a patriarchal society that has essentially stacked the deck against them. Toews does an incredible job playing these ideas of justice, retribution, forgiveness and grace in the recorded conversations of the women that is by turns funny, warm, exasperating and hopeful. Hidden in a barn loft the clock is ticking and a decision must be made.
I was on board for the first part of the book. Sarah and David perfectly capture the drama of highschool romance. For David love is a declaration requiring a grand gesture, but Sarah instinctively recoils at the PDA and hurts David. It just spirals from there, things escalating in their minds. Add to that the fact of them being drama nerds and its becomes altogether extra. I wanted more of this (and I'd get it shortly with Sarah Rooney's Normal People) but then Susan Choi switches gears. It's not about those two at all, she's got bigger fish to fry and that's where she lost me.
The shift in perspective wrong-footed me and suddenly I'm thrown out of the story and trying to align the pieces in my head. I've moved beyond unreliable narrator into meta unreliability and teetering at the edge of why should I care at all. And considering some of themes she's exploring that's a dangerous sentiment to hold. Some wild coincidence, another shift, and a weak stumble to the end and it just feels I've just never made the necessary connections that would reveal Susan Choi's grand design.
It's hard not to go into this without some expectation. This won the Pulitzer after all. High literature and human comedy - we're setting the difficulty level on expert here. Freighted with all that, I'm underwhelmed at the offset. Arthur nearly misses hosting an author interview due to a stopped clock and a handler who thinks he should be a woman.
Where are we going with this? It's starts to feel like a gay Eat, Pray, Love. “A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows? ...It's a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.” notes Arthur's lesbian friend at one point in the novel. And his pratfalls begin to appear less dire misfortune but rather a product of his own self-consciousness.
But Greer does manage to win me over.
Arthur is nearing fifty having survived life's “humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life.” This is warmth in book form. Moments of wonder and unexpected beauty written with an easy grace that had me rooting for Arthur. And Greer really stuck the landing on this one. Lovely.
It's a bit all over the place with its numerology, Malay superstition, Confucian virtues, colonialism and a weird step-sibling will-they-won't-they romance thrown in.
We kick things off in 1930 Malaya and the orphan houseboy Ren, tasked by his dying master to find and return his severed finger within 49 days so that his ghost isn't doomed to wander the earth forever. An impossible task and yet we are introduced to the inevitable converging thread of Ji Lin, a dancehall girl who finds herself inexplicably in possession of a severed finger in a glass tube. Together with their siblings they make up 4 of the 5 Confucian virtues. Meanwhile there is an elusive notion of a weretiger possibly lurking the jungle nearby while the body count continues to grow.
Suddenly we find ourself in a supernatural thriller. Ren's dead twin Yi keeps appearing in dreams, visiting Ji Lin as well. There we find a train to the land of the dead and an ominous shadow lurking in the water. Are the dreams offering clues or warnings? The veil between worlds somehow thinner in Malaya. Who is the 5th Confucian virtue that will complete this fractured body?
Matters are resolved but hardly in the same tenor as the build-up would have you believe. The mythic gives way to the mundane and it's like the story decides to shake itself awake from the dream it was having. Still, I enjoyed Ren's company and can't begrudge the richly rendered world of Malaya that leapt from the page.
The first half of this collection of short stories by Teresa Solana (translated by her husband) is just a hella fun smattering of crime vignettes. We've got prehistoric detectives, sunscreen wearing vampires, murderous grannies and soap opera loving ghosts. Gleefully black social satire that shifts gears for the second half. Here Solana teases the reader to make the connections across these stories. Less fantastical and instead focused on a small section of Barcelona. (I can't help but think of George from the movie Booksmart smugly pronouncing Barcelona with the spanish lisp - I imagine him cowering somewhere at the pivotal pharmacy) It's still got that playful style, satirical noir as it were, despite being anchored in the “real” world.
It's an experimental prose poem, but it's so carefully structured. Dead Papa Toothwort seems a weird indulgence, the snippets of conversation he overheads curling on the page as we eavesdrop on the small village. “Pretty in a smudgy kind of way / all pumped up and shiny like a greased pig / cheers for that Ma, stout gives me the runs / jaunty little bit of topiary / godless, ferret-handling maniac / Mark smelt of rivers, we don't welcome hobbyists Malcolm.”
But Toothwort is necessary to frame the story Max Porter wants to tell. It's a fairy tale for the modern era. (And just as short) Lanny is a precocious child, his parents letting him exist in his sun-dappled world, free to let his imagination wander or they are negligent, bordering on irresponsible and even worse, opportunistic.
Would make one hell of a TV script with Reseng, our protagonist torn between the old world of trained career assassins, the back-alley, anything for a buck world of the Meat Market and the slick, MBA having, Stanford educated Hanja and his corporate supermarket of death. The host of eclectic characters from the soft-hearted but bear-sized owner of the pet crematorium, the cross-eyed, knitting librarian, the non-stop talking convenience store owner and her wheelchair bound sister. The action is done well and the story moves but I guess I like a bit more flourish in my writing. The translation is serviceable but I have a Western appetite for wordy flourishes on the page and the need for some authorial pyrotechnics. It's a question of activist versus originalist translations explored a bit more here: https://youtu.be/rKmkhWh_vzY
It's just such a delicious writerly challenge. You envision some future world - a seemingly benign surveillance state where everything is on video, where everyone records the facts of their days and lives entirely by truth. Where lies are punishable by law and enforced by Speculators that can sense lies in the very air. Where even fiction is banned and TV shows are just curated recordings of actual surveilled events. Now, how does one get away with murder in this world?
And there is this joyful sense of satire as you begin in this fictional place built on truth inspired by Winter's new understanding of our current real world after watching the swirling alternate facts reality of Trump's inauguration. Fun! And Winters is a smooth writer, taking us through this police procedural in a skewed dystopia without getting too mired in the world-building. But he wants his cake and to eat it too.
Talking about it with people smarter than me who noticed the presence of white lies in this world and the grey area of hyperbolic advertising claims. Magicians are allowed but how does science even progress if theorizing is a form of lying? Even our own speculator is guilty of lying. Nitpicking sure and I'm more than willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of a good story but Winters just can't stick the landing. It feels rushed and hand-wavy instead of earned. Winters tees up some interesting aspects but finds himself scrambling in the rough at the end.
Tough gig having this come out the year after Richard Power's incredible Overstory but Michael Christie absolutely delivers the goods. The stories are concentric rings of a tree as we go backwards in time, passing the central core and radiating outwards again. But we kick off in the not too distant future.
We're on a remote island off the coast of BC that is one of the world's last old-growth forests where only the wealthy can come to commune with the trees in the “Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral.” Little green is left after the Great Withering. It's all dust-choked cities and folks battling rib retch - a cough that can snap ribs.
From here we dive back through four generations of Greenwoods over 130 years. Christie drops threads as we work our way back to 1908. Despite starting in the future we won't see the forest for the trees (sorry/not sorry) until we make our way back from the turn of the century. It's a beautiful bit of storytelling. Each generation seems a mystery to the next.
The Greenwoods legacy is one of hardship and suffering and yet in Christie's hands remains ever hopeful. A sweeping family saga of resilience filled with compelling characters whose lives are tied to the trees that ultimately fit together like a perfect dovetail joint.
The book itself it a piece of work too. (At least my Canadian edition) The hardback is made with 100% recycled paper using vegetable-based inks and water-based adhesives. Thiis one of “the most sustainably published books in Canada ever ...connecting the reading experience and the physical object of the book.
The epigraph reads “This might hurt a little - be brave.”
Lord thunderin' Jesus there is dark stuff ahead rendered in some of the most compelling prose I've read from this year's Giller shortlist. Jaw-dropping at times. It's Valentines Day at the Hazel in downtown St. John's Newfoundland and no one is getting out unscathed. It's a bleak #MeToo novel, examining toxic masculinity, an enabling culture, and little in the way of a clear or even hopeful path through.
Megan Gail Coles is unflinching, completely merciless, and sentiment free in her writing. I found the start disjointed and unfamiliar but it came sharply into focus like a roadside accident you can't look away from. You're compelled yet can't help but feel horrifyingly voyeuristic and implicated by your gaze. I can't wait to see what she's got in store next.
Forced from intensive farming, Isabella Tree and her husband give their 3,500 acres at Knepp Estate back to nature. Easier said than done when even our conception of nature leans to order. Giving weeds free rein and letting ancient trees topple and rot in place. Introducing native fauna like Tamworth pigs to root in the dirt, Exmoor ponies, fallow deer and long horn cattle to graze in the fields and resisting the urge to supplementary feed them, even if it means some will succumb to harsh winters.
The result, a proliferation of threatened species find a home in this wild estate. Turtle doves, purple emperor butterflies, peregrine falcons, multiple owl and bat species all find a place at Knepp. It takes on traditional notions of conservation that aims to save specific species in favour of building an ecosystem that allows endangered species to thrive. This explosion in biodiversity shows what can happen when people surrender the management of nature to nature. But this rewilding of Knepp estate delivers even more unexpected and significant changes right down to the soil itself and the land's ability to mitigate against flooding.
And while I admit that I might have initially found myself in the camp of affronted neighbours complaining of a weed covered landscape littered with dead trees, pats of dung underfoot and a veritable wall of insect life I found myself, in the end, swayed by Tree's persuasive arguments.
I struggled with this one. The constant switching of timelines and narrators kept me perpetually off balance. I found myself wandering around this town of ghosts neither dazzled nor horrified, simply annoyed. Isn't there someplace I could just sit down for a moment without some ghost wandering over to tell me their life story? Perhaps I'm just like the critics of Juan Rulfo's time - puzzled and perhaps a little blind. The book sold poorly and Rulfo never wrote another book. In the ensuing years he would inspire Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez said he could recite the book by heart) and become part of the Latin American canon. It just didn't work for me.
A bit of a cliché really, everyone under quarantine and suddenly dogs are being adopted en masse while folks find a renewed urge to twiddle their green thumbs. Not wholly immune to the impulse, I've been filling up the new work-from-home space with plants. And of course there's an abundance of online love with Reddit groups, YouTube channels, and Instagram accounts to stoke those chlorophyll cravings - not to mention a new batch of houseplant reads that are a far cry from the fusty hardback how-tos found at church book sales and second hand bookshops.
Beautifully shot and lovingly designed, this is a pretty primer for the starting home horticulturalist. By far the most basic of the plant books I've snagged from the library, but no less lovely to look at.
Our narrator is near death and recalling the events of the summer of 1969 when she found herself at an abandoned country house. Despite her boozy sounding name, Fran Jellico is a 39 year old, thick around the middle, awkward, greying virgin barely held together with her mother's (who she's just lost) foundation garments. Suddenly she's thrown in with Peter and his mercurial wife Cara and despite not knowing how to meet people, make friends, and hold a conversation she manages to strike a summer friendship with the couple.
When it's done well, I'm happy to read a sun dappled and bittersweet recollection of a summer past, but there's something more going on here. From the very onset Fran remembers looking down from the upstairs peephole to a body, lying in the pinking water of a bathtub, eyes open and staring for too long.
Gothic elements from shadowy figures hovering in windows, mysterious noises and secret rooms are introduced. Cara seems deeply troubled and her and Peter's relationship is not what it seems on the surface. The two stories seem at odds but are pulled together beautifully keeping you off-balance and questioning like some high-literary thriller. Kazuo Ishiguro, meets Charlotte Bronte channelling Gillian Flynn. An unexpected surprise.
Adan Barrera, our fictional stand-in for Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and the former head of the Sinaloa cartel is dead. With the ruthless next generation scrambling to fill the void, Pax Sinaloa is no more. Bodies are piling up, chopped into pieces, hung from bridges, screened on social media as they are tortured and executed, or cut down in a hail of bullets as alliances are made and broken.
Meanwhile former Agent Art Keller has been appointed head of the DEA and is certain of only one thing, the war on drugs has failed. It's been a half-century of failed policy at a cost of $1 trillion for 45 million arrests that hasn't made a dent. And now the United States is seeing a resurgence in heroin usage on the heels of the opioid epidemic and the introduction of deadly fentanyl.
Winslow also weaves in stories of a 10 year old boy trying to sneak into the US on the real world “tren de la muerte”, the disappearance and subsequent massacre of 43 students that happened in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico in 2014 and of course real-estate tycoon turned reality TV star with a tenuous grasp of the English language and a love for Twitter taking the 2016 presidential election - John Dennison (a combination perhaps of John Barron and David Dennison, two pseudonyms Trump has been known to use.)
And of course the also fictional son-in-law relying on drug cartel money to finance foundering real estate investments in exchange for inside influence that goes to the very top.
It's a lot to take in and frankly should come with a trigger warning as any hint of resolution or justice feels more like artistic license and the lone bit of authorial indulgence. I suspect the reality is far worse and even less likely to be resolved.
As if dropped from the sky, Bertha Truitt is found unconscious in Salford Cemetery with a bag beside her containing “one abandoned corset, one small bowling ball, one slender candlepin, and, under a false bottom, fifteen pounds of gold.” She awakes and quickly gets to work building a candlepin alley in town.
OK I guess. I mean I'm intrigued but it just can't sustain me for an entire book. At the sentence level McCracken absolutely slays, her writing feels turn of the century meets Tim Burton which works in small doses. In aggregate though it can totter to what repeatedly comes up as “twee” and I simply couldn't take a full-length novel of it. I think I would have enjoyed these more as a series of jewel-like short stories instead of the accumulated mass of it all that overwhelms like a flood of molasses. (A plot point here that actually did happen in real life.)
Frustratingly I tried to invest myself in Bertha but she passes the story on to others and we jump from character to character. It's as if McCracken is determined to avoid creating any resolution for any of her characters. Knock the pins down and they get set up again for another frame.
While George Saunders can kill it with the short story, this collection from 2007 pulls together some of his non-fiction works. And no surprise here, Saunders occasionally nails it with pieces that make the whole worth reading. Other stories fade as quickly as they're read. Nothing terrible, just weak.
Naturally, what exactly is strong or weak differs for everyone. Not much of a polarizing review here I know. Saunders has a likeable, inclusionary style. He's not the delicious wonk that David Foster Wallace is, more an affable uncle with a winking delivery.
It's the story of young George Washington Black, 11 years old as the books start in 1830. He's a slave on Faith Plantation in Barbados, under a new master. Wash understands instinctively that Erasmus Wilde owned their lives, and their deaths, and that clearly pleased him too much. But we're soon introduced to his brother Christopher Wilde or Titch who will change Wash's life. It's an adventure story that sees Washington off to Virginia, the Arctic, Nova Scotia, London, Amsterdam and Morocco jumping from one improbable situation to another massive coincidence. And read that way it's an entertaining, if mostly forgettable read.
But this is a Giller Prize winner, the second for Esi Edugyan! A Man Booker shortlisted title - clearly reading it as a plot driven travelogue is naive. Smarter people than I loved this so what am I missing? Is this wrestling with white guilt - is Titch an ally to Wash or is he simply white knighting to assuage the guilt he feels over profiting from their labours? Or is this more about Wash's struggles in freedom and the commitment to life when all you've ever known is slavery and the narrative that death is the only true escape? Insert shrug emoji here.
Maybe it's the perfect book club read. Seems like faint praise for this much lauded book, but there's a lot to tease out if you want to put the effort in ...otherwise it's just an unlikely story with lots of hand-wavy explanations and convenient plot devices that makes for a nice enough diversion.
My head-scratching review here: https://youtu.be/uRk8q__uqm8
This was wild! And as crazy as it was, the story just keeps on getting wilder with the case against Elizabeth Holmes going on as we speak. She's got a new millionaire boyfriend with their first child born mere months before potentially facing 20 years in jail, a disguised father-in-law hobnobbing with the press and Theranos CEO superfans otherwise known as Holmies. But all this started with author John Carreyrou's front page Wall Street Journal article that pulled the veil from this Silicon Valley health startup darling and its one time 9 billion dollar valuation.
It is a turtlenecked cult of personality that managed to hoodwink an impressive and ever growing list of board members and investors that included former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, and George Schultz, former secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, former secretary of Defense James Mattis, heirs to the Walmart fortune and Rupert Murdoch who would all subsequently sink $900 million in the blood testing company.
It's also about some dogged journalism facing off against a massive corporation with millions to ward off inquisitive minds and billions to lose. A pitbull lawyer relying on surveillance, NDAs, massive lawsuits and heavy-handed tactics to shut down would-be whistleblowers. Walgreens ready to roll out an untested and unreliable blood testing device nationwide for fear of missing out, unable to hear dissenting voices.
Behind it all is a CEO with delusions of grandeur, escorted everywhere with a phalanx of bodyguards who referred to her as Eagle 1, flying off in private jets to deliver TedTalks and press junkets with Vice-Presidents. All the while lying to investors, firing dissenting voices, hiding the truth and speaking at an affected lower vocal register for some reason.
It's the power of connections in this world, the pervasive tech mantra of “fake it till you make it” and the success at all costs mentality we've so readily adopted. In hindsight it seems inevitable that Theranos was destined to come crashing down, but the book feels like a blueprint to countless other VC backed unicorns that are moving fast and breaking things with valuations based more on hype than high performance.
Pat Barker offers up a retelling of Homer's Illiad from the perspective of 19 year old Briseis who sparked the fight between the mighty Achilles and Agamemnon, King of men. It's the latest in female led interpretations of the classics that's just so hot right now with Madeline Miller's Circe and Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's Odyssey.
After the sacking of Lynessus, Briseis is offered to Achilles as a war prize. Her story seems an answer to the line Priam utters in the Iliad, pleading with Achilles to return his son's Hector's body to him. Escorted into the Greek camp by Hermes he falls to his knees and says, “I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.”
When Briseis echoes that statement she does so with a bit more force. “I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”
And while I'm thankful for the arms distance remove the story is often written in, it can almost approach impassive. Barker does occasionally brings the focus in and it's justly unsettling. From Achilles' spear piercing Briseis' brother's neck as he lay wriggling like a stuck pig as Briseis watches. This warrants barely any attention from Achilles as he fastidiously puts his foot on his neck to pull out his spear. And when Agamemnon takes Briseis as his own, he shows his contempt and ownership of her by hurling a gob of phlegm into her mouth.
The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, the camp of war brides and slaves, Achilles communing with his goddess mother all lacked the heft I was hoping for. The personal stakes seemed diffused under the haze of hoary legend and Briseis' defiant sounding ending seemed unbelievably sad and ironic.
I've been a fan of Heather Havrilesky since the prehistoric days of the internet when she was writing for Suck.com. An ancient past when my pre-work routine would consist of reading long form stories called blogs, back when paragraphs weren't so intimidating. Thankfully our modern era, sensitive to our time constraints, has since concentrated my mornings to scrolling memes, instagram pics and 140 character tweets.
Heather is smart and acerbic and I love her voice - she writes like I imagine I one day could, wry observations heaped with the gloss of 10 dollar words. Unfortunately I fear I've started with the wrong book. It's still her erudite and cutting wit applied to the mundanity of everyday life, but it veers too close to earnest screed. It's easy pickings decrying the capitalist fantasies of Fifty Shades or the insufferability of foodies, Disneyland and Crossfitters. To claim we need to get out more, and online less.
But unfettered by the constraints of blogging and fleeting online attention - free to truly flex in book form, the chapters can tend to the baggy. Things used to have to be tighter, or maybe my attention has just shrunk. Maybe in this environment I need my reasonable edicts to be delivered as precise, ranting screeds, eviscerating polemics that point and laugh at the misguided other in 1000 words or less. ...insert appropriate gif meme here.
Pearl is beaten at home, at school, and even by the neighbours and yet still somehow considers herself lucky given the distance of time. Looking back she harbours no ill-will to her father despite the horrific beatings. There is a graphically recounted event involving her father repeatedly smashing her with a broken badminton racket's aluminum frame, ripping open her head and hands and covering Pearl in enough blood that her sister passed out simply looking at her. Another incident where she was left near immobile on the ground, her hands suddenly gripped in a palsy from her father's unrelenting blows. Horrible and yet recalled with blunt stoicism - punishments justified as being borne out of parental love and concern. That somehow that was what was missing from her friend Jeong-Ae's life. That was what could have pulled her back from the decisions she made that pulled her down a different path that started when they decided to run away at 15 and find themselves quickly swept up into a world of brothels.
A precise work told at a ten year remove, we see Pearl as an adult recounting these events as she pieces together her own graphic novel. Ancco/Pearl imbues her remembered friendship with warmth and confidently nails the young voices that can be both brash and bullying as well as scared and naive. There is a quiet hope here amidst the violence - small, vague and entirely human. Beautifully done.
Kris Pulaski loved to play guitar and her heavy metal band Durt Wurk put in the work, hit the road and played every backwoods dive, seedy bar and smoky venue with their big break surely just around the corner.
But that was 20 years ago. Now she works nights at a Best Western contending with urinating guests while her band mate Terry Hunt has gone off on his own to wealth and acclaim. A solo metal phenomenon rebranded as Koffin. He's back for one last set of shows and it spurs Kris to try and unravel why they all broke up in the first place.
Hendrix captures the in-fighting and brothers in arms duality of being in a band. He also drops a ton of lovely metal morsels throughout the book that had me reaching for classic Black Sabbath. (I love that an intrepid fan has already created a comprehensive playlist of every song referenced in the book on Spotify) A couple of grisy horror set pieces and man, what did UPS ever do to Grady Hendrix anyways? A fun diversion but a bit of a wash for me at the end.
The “presenting problem” for the patient is a breakup. The man she was going to marry has suddenly announced that he does not see a future together, especially not one that includes the patient's 10 year old son. Patient is incredulous considering her son has always been a part of the relationship. Patient has a hard time focusing at work, has resorted to Google stalking her ex, and is eager to be validated in her opinion that said boyfriend is a world-class jerk.
Patient is also practicing psychotherapist and author Lori Gottlieb.
Finding herself sitting on “both sides” of the couch as a psychotherapist and patient she is given the opportunity to see how we can often sabotage our way to understanding and find ourselves locked into a path with no good options.
While dealing with her breakup she is also counselling a newlywed with cancer with little time left on the clock to an older retiree, divorced 3 times and estranged from her kids who is determined to end her life on her upcoming 70th birthday. There's the anxious 20 something that probably drinks too much and dates the wrong type of guys to the self-absorbed Hollywood asshole who is, in his own estimation, surrounded by idiots.
Gottlieb isn't trying to convince the masses that psychotherapy is the answer, she's not looking to make converts here. She's a natural storyteller and this is a lesson on hope, suffused with warmth and humour. How we all want so badly to be heard and to be liked by others but sometimes we need someone to help us reframe our story so that we can do the same for ourselves.