On Book: Spring Awakenings (5 Picks)
With a welcome warmth, these fast reads are all about new ways of seeing things — from experiencing face-blindness, to life-changing book selections, to a rom-com’s novel approach to dating. Here are five great books for spring.
A long-forgotten part of me is waking up, and it feels wonderful,
like emerging from hibernation into a spring full of possibilities.
— Is She Really Going Out With Him?
Kate & Frida
Kim Fay
Set locally
If suffering is contagious, then why isn’t joy?
Which virus do we want to spread?
It starts in the most random, old-school of ways: a new customer wants to place a book order. By mail. Enclosed is a traveler’s check. And pick me out something else, too, while you’re at it.
Such begins the multi-continent correspondence of two 20-somethings; one, looking for herself abroad; the other, working at her hometown’s flagship bookstore. Over their (fictional) letters, which span from fall 1991 to mid-1994, we see the cared-for become the caretaker; the gourmand enter a war zone; and both young women ponder the world’s deep injustices while finding a place for themselves among the many pages, locations, and events.
And the setting brings a special treat for us locals. Welcome to The Elliott Bay Book Company — whoops, I mean “Puget Sound Book Company” — from 30 years back, on its old corner in Pioneer Square, where it both blended into and dominated the landscape. You can practically hear the wood floors creak, on the gangway between the store’s face-to-face info desks, as you read. Fay was a bookseller at the real Elliott Bay and based key characters on people at the store, a familiarity that shines through these pages. Woven through is a good dose of nostalgia for a city that felt much smaller, and a world that felt larger and harder to reach.
Kate & Frida is a bit navel-gazing by necessity — a coming-of-age tale in epistolary form, swaying between mundanity and consequential time leaps — but it’s as much show as it is tell. Their exchanges are a tribute to keeping something up despite it all. It’s looking for a story and realizing you’re living one; a demonstration of self-compassion in a changing world; a permission slip to discover with forgiveness, and recognizing, as Fay puts it in her end note, “It was not a waste of time loving someone you outgrew.”
Also try: Love & Saffron (also by Fay); My Life in France (Julia Child & Alex Prud’homme).
Release date: 3/11/2025, from Putnam (Penguin Random House); 288 pages. Book info here.
The Door-to-Door Bookstore
Carsten Henn
translated by Melody Shaw
If you’re a character in a book, you live forever.
For as long as someone reads you, you’re alive.
Sometimes you can only see the next chapter when everything you know is ripped away. That’s how it’s unfolding for old-school book-walker Carl, who for a lifetime has walked the same route around his little town, every day, hand-delivering books to his customers.
Nowadays, that list is short, the deliveries few, and the only ones on his route are those who are stuck in place for one reason or another: a lone nun who won’t leave her convent, lest it close forever; a woman who holds up indoors after her husband’s unlikely accident; a man who secretly can’t read, but orders books for the conversations about them. And then there are his most voracious readers: a wealthy young man surrounded by loneliness at his estate; a woman seeking escapism from her controlling husband; and a rich-voiced reader for the rollers at a cigar factory (bringing lovely notes of Nilo Cruz’s play, Anna in the Tropics).
Carl can read the writing on the wall: his position isn’t long for this world; and when the store’s beloved founder dies and the daughter takes over, it all but inks his fate.
But the lives of him and his readers have become more intertwined than by the physical books alone, and unwinding them isn’t so easy. As his job and purpose sunset, as Carl feels himself become obsolete, can he find a way to make a difference beyond those daily deliveries? His uninvited fellow travelers — a stubborn tagalong child and a cat named Dog — might have some insight.
Release date: 12/10/2024 in paperback (7/4/2023 hardcover), from Hanover Square Press (HarperCollins); 224 pages. Book info here.
Is She Really Going Out With Him?
Sophie Cousens
We might have to widen the net beyond your school friends’ divorced parents.
Features writer Anna Appleby is having a hard enough time dating after her husband decided to “better himself” and walk out on her. But getting forced into the dating pool for purposes of her column, and letting her two kids pick the dates, is not how she saw things progressing.
Trying to prove her worth at work amidst ever-looming budget cuts, Anna agrees to team up for a piece about dating without the apps — as a companion piece with her work-bane and biggest rival. Predictably (for the genre, if not in life), sparks fly. Equally predictably (in life as in the genre), things are complicated, and reality doesn’t always fit the fantasy. Meanwhile, Anna is yanked out of her comfort zone via a series of odd dates with, among others, a TV star (to her ex’s chagrin), the postman (a surprise Regency aficionado), and an intolerable neighbor (the kids assure: “She hasn’t liked anyone we’ve picked so far, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t like each other”).
Despite the setup, little about this story feels forced. Instead, it offers a well-balanced give-and-take. It’s being open to love but being happy on your own. It’s finding a balance of standing up for your kids, as a parent, and standing up for your own self, as a whole-ass person. There’s plenty of snark and comically bad ideas, but also a focus on healing, where the happily-ever-after isn’t always about romance. Meeting an unlikely new friend, for example, our increasingly wise protagonist recalls: “I suggested we meet for coffee or a drink, but she proposed art instead. ‘Much more restorative.’”
Cousens’ setup is sweet, her observations keen, and her characters entertaining. An escape into fantasy with the right dose of familiarity, this is rom-com at its best.
Release date: 11/19/2024, from Putnam (Penguin Random House); 368 pages. Book info here.
What Happened to the McCrays?
Tracey Lange
For just a little while, she forgets she’s not allowed to be happy.
How long does a mutual lie have to fester before someone comes clean?
Longtime sweethearts Kyle and Casey have both been lying to themselves over a past tragedy, creating a narrative that assigns blame from a patchwork of facts that leaves each seeming eternally unlovable — especially to themselves. Time and distance hasn’t healed; it’s just left them sitting with the consequences of painful stories neither of them vetted. But when circumstances force a reunion of proximity in their small hometown, it’s only a matter of time before someone starts talking.
Tracey Lange writes real, recognizable characters, in all their grit and disappointments. There’s no illusion of happily-ever-afters in her tales, only good days and bad ones. But when people are doing the best they can with what they’ve got, her characters show that hard work and determination can pay off, and good people do get their wins.
I’ve been a fan since We Are the Brennans and eagerly awaited this year’s release. What Happened to the McCrays didn’t disappoint. Lange has a remarkable ability to write ordinary people doing ordinary things who have extraordinary impacts on those around them. It’s the flavor of kindness and community a lot of us need right now, as both a comfort food and an example.
Also try: We Are the Brennans (also by Lange); The Lager Queen of Minnesota (J. Ryan Stradal).
Release date: 1/14/2025, from Celadon Books (Macmillan); 352 pages. Book info here.
Do I Know You?
Sadie Dingfelder
Non-fiction
I don’t know about movies, but the real world looks better in 3D.
How do you know if you see the world as others do, without knowing how they see it?
As this book finds, it’s less easy test and more non-linear discovery: from sensing something is different; to trying to compare something so subjective as visual experiences; to figuring out what to compare them to, anyway; and, finally, to understanding what it all means. (“The problem with introspection as a scientific method isn’t just that it’s somewhere between hard and impossible to objectively verify.”)
The result is a dual journey, introducing readers to the little-understood condition of face-blindness (or prosopagnosia) while the author discovers it for herself.
Dingfelder’s experience, both professionally as a reporter and personally with the condition, make for a unique ability to explain and reveal. With a keen sense of what we need to know in order to go along on this journey, she alternately relates through off-hand experiences, embarrassments, and perceived slights; shares anecdotes she collects as she connects with others; and accessibly maps out the science behind seeing (or not). Her story shows how differently we all see things, in a literal sense.
Release date: 6/25/2024, from Little, Brown Spark (Hachette); 304 pages. See book info here.
Chase D. Anderson is Editor & Producer of NWTheatre.org.