✨Ellen📍SF,CA 🌉✨

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Witty Wednesday

[FAIR ONES edition]

I love a talky novel. This one is by an author I adore, Lydia Millet. It's her latest, just out earlier this month. I enjoyed it immensely! Many thanks to @w.w.norton for my aARC.

This is a story of friendship & loss that is also frequently quite funny. Two middle-aged, unmarried women, New Yorkers & best friends, have lost their mutual third bestie in a senseless (is there any other kind?) act of gun violence. The three had been inseparable since college; the plot begins right after the loss of Claire, from Mara's perspective, then resumes about a year later from Jen's. It's thus a double novel & the two parts are quite different in tone. Mara is more of an open book, struggling to make sense of this trauma, while Jen is guarded, trying to escape her feelings. Life continues, with the grief of Claire's absence as a throughline for both complex characters. How to move on?

Fair Ones is by no means only sad, though. Rather it's an exploration of grief both raw & muted, while also capturing the small moments of lives, magical & mundane, shameful & joyful. There are elderly parents, significant others, coworkers, & some older kids--all engaging. Also a captivating hodgepodge of jobs & parties, dogs & peacocks, hot tubs & celebrities. The writing, much of it snappy but believable dialogue, is beautiful. This story moves along quickly, but has staying power.

Touching, witty, tender, reflective--I couldn't put Fair Ones down. Thank you, @lydia.millet ! Forever fan here.

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Let's talk Millet books, covers and/or birds. Fair Ones is now a challenger to my previous Millet favorite, Dinosaurs, but The Children's Bible also made an impact. I love this cover art. There are a surprising number of book covers with birds on them--have you ever noticed? Do you have a favorite birdish cover? As for favorite birds, there are so many, but peacocks are right up there, along with owls (I hear them hooting back & forth while falling asleep at night), hawks & eagles, quails (there's a covey living in my yard), penguins, & hummingbirds, which visit my garden & feeders and are surprisingly aggressive.