I’ve been in a lots-of-reading-but-no-writing kick after finishing a final re-write of “She Returns…” and another revision of my newest MS. Most of the reading has been fiction, and two books I enjoyed particularly were Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey, a book about a young magazine writer who returns to her stuffy-academic home town after her father, an eminent poetry critic, passes away and leaves her the literary executor to a book of poetry. This may be criticized as thinly-veiled autobiography, since the author is the daughter of (still living, as far as I know – see comments) Amherst President and novelist Peter Pouncey. The character is amazingly unlikable right up until the end of the book. I don’t dislike books just because their main characters are unlikable, at least not all the time, and I enjoyed what this book had to say about poetry, about small towns, about the academic world (I’m a professor’s daughter myself, so…) and about the complicated relationships between daughters and fathers. In a satifying conclusion, she both lets go of her father and embraces his influence on her life after a tremendous betrayal by someone close to her. I’d say the last fifth of the book was worth the somewhat slow beginning. The other book was How to Buy a Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson, which was 1. misclassified as YA fiction, and 2. had such a mean-spirited Publisher’s Weekly Review that I instantly felt the need to defend it. It’s really a fun book about class and reading, about the relationship between author and audience. Here’s my review from Goodreads:
“A mashup of plots from soaps like “The OC” and “Gossip Girl,” a dash of “Prep,” some satire of writers/postmodern lit and a bit of characterization from F. Scott Fitzgerald, this book was fun to read on a sentence level and the occasional witticisms were worth waiting for. Much better than the Publisher’s Weekly review would have you believe; maybe they were in a bad mood when they read it, because I found it highly entertaining and the baroque swirls of “metaplot” non-irritating.”

This is another book with an unlikable young main character, who turns into a character I really cared about and cheered for by the end. I would have liked more about the struggling female novelist in the book, actually, and less about the spoiled teen characters (I was a “scholarship” kid at a midwestern prep school for most of my youth, so there’s no shock value in describing that world for me) but that’s probably because I’m craving more books about female writers. There are suprisingly few of them (if you don’t count LM Montgomery books.) If you have any you recommend, let me know in the comments. I’m in a literary fiction mood and want more to read!