Why is it so popular? It’s possible that many of the novel’s younger fans simply haven’t read enough to recognize how tired Yarros’ language and motifs are. Cliché makes reading a speedier process for people uninterested in anything but plot. But romance fans in particular have become fairly sophisticated consumers of their genre, speaking like connoisseurs of their favorite variations on such venerable tropes as “fake relationship,” “forced proximity,” and “friends to lovers.” What makes Fourth Wing risible to someone who wants something fresh or surprising from a novel makes it a familiar comfort to someone in search of an immersive escape. As violent and merciless as Violet and Xaden’s world is, it is governed by narrative laws that are reassuringly consistent and unbreakable. The more perilous and unpredictable the real world seems to be, the more appealing such scenarios become. Sure, you’ve read it all before, many, many times. That’s how you know that everything will turn out all right in the end.
The first time I slept with my future husband was in a beach house an hour north of my childhood home. My boyfriend had been given the keys to it for the weekend by its owner, Camilla, a retiree he’d worked for in the New Zealand government. The house was a modest rectangular modernist box, raised off the lawn, wood paneled inside, except for floor-to-ceiling windows at the front with a wide view of the coastal sky. Neither the building nor its contents seemed to have been updated since the sixties, and the atmosphere inside was super cozy. A pair of recliners upholstered in nubby beige angled toward each other in the lounge, around a low table crying out for matching teacups and scones fresh from the oven. When my boyfriend mentioned that Camilla’s sister was often at the house with her, I instantly saw them sitting there, two old maids in cardigans and sensible shoes, tut-tutting over the papers and arguing over who’d pick up the cold cuts for their afternoon guests.
My boyfriend and I had only just started dating, but he was handsome, smart, and kind, and I was optimistic about our future together. I was also, technically, still a virgin and knew I was likely to rectify that within the next half hour. As I moved through Camilla’s house, I should have been consumed with excitement, capable of attending to nothing but our two young bodies and what we were about to do with them. Instead, a different thought was forming in my mind. It reached its climax as I laid my valise in the sunny bedroom, where my childhood would soon officially end. Omg—my chest thrummed—what if Julia and I bought this place when we retired and lived here together till we died?
“Every story worth telling is a love story,” the narrator writes. “But this is not that story.” She’s right, but only because The Vulnerables is not a story—not purely a story. It collects diverse objects and forges links out of happenstance, creating a structure that insists on the possibility of connection. The novel’s most valuable offering comes from its ability to gather elements and hold them together, as we wished to hold one another. In this respect, love pervades every page.
“The Future” is so pleasing and page-turning a read, so full of intrigue, emotional depth and a delicious conclusion that I didn’t want it to end. That Alderman — who was raised Orthodox Jewish — manages to mine the Book of Genesis in exciting ways, making accessible the parables of community, conflict and survival found in its pages, is an added and surprising bonus. It’s almost enough to make you believe, despite the evidence, that the bleakest of futures isn’t inevitable.
In The Conversion, Lohrey delves into the places we call home, exploring the intricate dance between our influence on them and their transformative impact on us.
Does the misuse of the word ‘literally’ make your toes curl? Do the vocal tics of young ’uns set you worrying about the decline of the noble English language? You are not alone. But your fears are misplaced – at least according to the linguist Valerie Fridland.
Fridland’s Like, Literally, Dude does an excellent job of vindicating words and ways of speaking we love to hate. Tracing your ‘verys’ and your singular ‘theys’ across centuries and continents, Fridland offers a history of linguistic pet peeves that are much older than we might assume and have more important functions in communication than most of us would like to give them credit for.