Heart the Lover

Heart the Lover 

by Lily King

I bought a Kindle. I’m not quite sure what I’m going through, but first Audible and now a Kindle...clearly something is happening. It showed up two days ago, and honestly, it’s adorable. Small, lightweight, and easy to use. I immediately set it up and downloaded Heart the Lover by Lily King.

It’s an easy, quick read, but one that stirred up memories of my college years, early adulthood, and the life decisions that shape who we become. Rather than focusing on one sweeping romance, the book traces the emotional terrain of relationships, friendships, ambitions, and regrets over the course of three decades. That long view is what makes the story feel so honest and resonant.

The storyline captures how people change...and how they don’t. The characters’ lives unfold in ways that feel natural and unforced, shaped by choices made in youth and the consequences that follow them into middle age. I especially loved how the novel moves through time, allowing us to see how relationships evolve, fracture, and sometimes reveal truths that were buried for years. There’s a quiet power in watching the truth emerge slowly and inevitably by the end.

While the book contains love, it isn’t a traditional love story. It’s more emotional than romantic, more reflective than idealized. Heart the Lover is about longing, honesty, and the complicated ways people hold onto the past while trying to move forward.

Sometimes you just need an easier read...something that helps you turn the pages. I really didn’t enjoy the last book I read, so I needed something that I did. I think my favorite part of this book was its realistic passage of time and life itself...the stuff that comes with living a life.

Stone Yard Devotional

 Stone Yard Devotional 

by Charlotte Wood

What did I just read?

Painful. Confusing. And honestly, not for me.

I’m not even sure how I came to reading it but I didn’t get it. I wanted to stop reading several times, but I kept going, mostly out of stubbornness and the hope that it might eventually get better.

My advice? Don’t even start.

I'll save you the time and do my best to provide a recap:  The book is a quiet, deeply contemplative novel centered on an unnamed woman who, in quick succession, divorces, loses her mother, quits her job with an endangered species organization, and finds herself at the beginning of the Covid shutdown. In response to all of this upheaval, she retreats to a remote religious community of cloistered nuns in rural Australia.

If you’re expecting tension, momentum, or even a compelling narrative…you won’t find it here.

Instead, the novel drifts…many times. There is a truly horrendous mouse plague that receives an extraordinary amount of attention…far more than I felt it deserved…and the graphic detail became distracting and gross rather than meaningful. There’s also the return of the bones of a nun murdered thirty years earlier, which causes disruption within the community, and the presence of a once-famous, scandal-tainted nun who attended high school with the narrator and endured a brutal, shame-filled upbringing.

All of this feeds into what the book is really doing: an introspective meditation on guilt, unresolved grief, forgiveness, and how, or whether, it’s possible to live meaningfully in the world after loss. On an intellectual level, I understand that this is what Wood is aiming for. On a reading level, I found it heavy, slow, and emotionally distant.

Ultimately, Stone Yard Devotional feels less like a novel and more like a prolonged meditation on life itself…on letting go, grieving, and the elusive nature of forgiveness. For some readers, that may be profound. For me, it was tedious and overwrought, with far too much time spent on mice and not enough on making me care.

If you like quiet, philosophical fiction and don’t mind ambiguity or discomfort, perhaps you will enjoy it. I just did not.

 

 

Wild Dark Shore

 

Wild Dark Shore 

by Charlotte McConaghy

Wild Dark Shore is easily landing on every book reviewer’s “Top Five Books of 2025” lists.

Unfortunately, it didn’t land on mine.

The premise did hook me in immediately: a family living in extreme isolation on a remote island near Antarctica, surrounded by seals, penguins, and the ocean. Supplies arrive by boat only twice a year. Honestly, that kind of remoteness fascinated me…while I was listening to it, I could imagine wanting to try living there.  To me, the island promises quiet, self-sufficiency, and a strange kind of freedom.

Climate change is forcing the island’s evacuation as the permafrost melts and systems fail. It’s eerie, cinematic, and genuinely fascinating.

After the death of his wife during childbirth, Dominic moves his three children to the island to take a job as lighthouse keeper. Once home to a bustling research station and a seed vault safeguarding the future of plant life, the island is being abandoned due to climate change.

First of all…Lighthouse Keeper? It immediately made me think of Winter Keeper (you remember from the book,The Wedding People)… the seed vault rang a bell, too. I follow a woman on Instagram who lives in Svalbard, Norway, near the Global Seed Vault….a real place where seeds are preserved to help humanity recover if global food systems fail.  Interesting how “keepers,” fictional or real, are all about protecting something worth saving.

Back to the book….a woman, Rowan, washes ashore. She is injured, bloodied, and barely alive. As the family nurses her back to health, she begins to sense that something is deeply wrong. Their stories don’t quite line up...she becomes suspicious.  Why do they whisper behind closed doors? Why has the radio been smashed? Why do they act like they have seen a ghost after finding out who she is?  Then Rowan discovers HER husband’s passport and laptop hidden beneath the floor of the tool shed. Bloodstains…once scrubbed clean…linger in the abandoned research facility. What happened here before she arrived? 

At times, throughout the book, it seems like the family is succumbing to madness…perhaps bred by isolation? 

My biggest struggle is with Dominic. He is a man who lets his daughter sleep on a sub-Antarctic beach because he doesn’t know how to talk to her. He’s also sleeping with, Rowan, the wife of a prisoner he’s keeping locked in a freezing underground vault. His ability to compartmentalize is… extraordinary…wouldn’t you say?   

What is this book filled with?  Grief, isolation, climate change, guilt, sacrifice, obsession, and the instinct to survive.

A few things I did like about the book…

I loved the wildness of nature.

My favorite part of the story.  The Wombats. 

“Wombats have a thing they do in fires. They take their families underground, into their burrows. They have tunnels under the earth, and they go down there to take shelter, but they don’t just take their families, they also take other animals down there. They save everyone they can. And then the mum and dad wombats stick their bums up into the entrances of the burrows to block the fire and the ash from coming down. And their bums get burned, and sometimes they die, but they protect the others.”

I loved that.  I didn’t know that.  Made me feel like they symbolized…a quiet survival, deep rootedness, and non-human endurance…a reminder that strength doesn’t have to be loud, fast, or visible to be real.

If the world was burning.  Where is your burrow? Who will you save?  Who will save you?

Another moment I genuinely loved was the scene with the whales washing ashore, and the collective effort to save them. Can you imagine witnessing that?  Being part of something so urgent and awe-filled, and then carrying that story with you for the rest of your life?

But then I’m brought back to not being able to recommend it because the romance between Dominic and Rowan…felt completely out of place. The characters barely knew each other, hardly spoke at first, and didn’t fully trust one another…go back up a few paragraphs…Dominic is hiding her husband…what kind of man is this? 

All of that said, I can absolutely see this becoming a compelling movie. The setting alone is cinematic: brutal winds, icy waters, storms rolling in over penguin-covered shores. The island feels like a character in its own right. 

Wild Dark Shore has all the ingredients of a haunting, unforgettable novel…I mean…movie.