No Complaints

Two weeks without assigned reading has left me scrambling to read as many page-turners as possible. In no particular order, these did not disappoint:

The High Season by Judy Blundell

“Maybe all relationships, friendship, partner, parent and child, were held together by the things you did not say as much as the things you did. The unsaid was the keystone in the arch. Once you kicked it free, you had nothing that held you up.” 

I Liked My Life by Abby Fabiaschi 

“Never complaining, I recently learned, is different from having no complaints.”

Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell

“That was how she’d once viewed her perfect life: as a series of bad smells and unfulfilled duties, petty worries and late bills.” 

The Singles Game by Lauren Weisberger

“If the US Open was a two-week trip to Ibiza, Wimbledon was a meditative hike through a scenic national park.” 

And I was even able to check off a reading challenge - an epistolary novel. 

Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher

“But there are other faculty here on campus who are not disposed to see notable scholarship ignored; and let it be known that, in the darkened, blood-strewn caverns of our offices, we are hewing our textbooks and keyboards into spears.” 

What if

 Do you ever think about how you ended up where you are? How many decisions, large and small, culminated in the now? What if I had gone to that college in another state, left that party 20 minutes earlier, waited another year to have a child? Caught that train instead of the next one?

This week’s challenge opened up a whole new genre for me, and I’m hooked. Alternate history.

It also reintroduced me to Jo Walton -whose novel The Just City I read for the challenge in 2016.

My Real Children is a tale of two Patricias. In one life, she says yes to her first proposal. In her other life, she says no. As elderly woman struggling with dementia, she remembers both just as vividly. In her life in a loveless marriage, she found her passion in advocating for peace. In her life spent with her true love, she must deal with a world plagued by violence.

Walton includes just enough detail from our own historical reality for discrepancies to be shocking. For example, when I read that Jackie Kennedy died along with her husband, I thought at first it was a rumor spread by the British newspapers.

The message of the novel seems to be that we’ll find love and adversity no matter which life we’ve chosen. So if we can’t change the past, it’s fun to imagine the possibilities in store for our future.