Tiny Beautiful Things | Cheryl Strayed
Neat
Discrete
Modular bits of honesty
Packaged in the form of an advice column,
Dear Sugar takes on questions about relationships, parenting, and other details of our life in the cosmos.
She responds with clarity and sensitivity,
Often sharing intimate glimpses into her own life,
Always with a generous serving of compassion.
The book ticks through a number of Dear Sugar questions and answers.
The author responds to each one in a naturally conversational and disarmingly affectionate style.
The result is comfortingly orderly and satisfyingly sweet.
The Marriage Portrait | Maggie O'Farrell
Lush and rich, exotically paced and luxuriantly detailed, this story is a sumptuous dream of what might have been. The truth is that the famous Medici family of Renaissance Florence did indeed produce a daughter Lucretia who was indeed married off to a duke at a shockingly young age and mysteriously perished not much more that one year later. Along with a handful of other factual details, the author, Maggie O'Farrell, has used her considerable imagination to embroider a story of what may have happened; a fanciful series of events that fill in the holes between the facts; to lead us, her breathless readers, on a whirlwind of coincidences and surprises that delivers us a very different ending that we may have expected.
Along the way, O'Farrell unfolds her story at a luxurious pace, detailing the tiny animals that gentle Lucretia loves to draw, the claustrophobic confines of her extravagantly designed and detailed wedding dress, every twitch and twinge of her husband's muscular body as rage overwhelms him. To be sure, some readers find O'Farrell's thorough attention to detail, her careful accounting of every possible fact, her patient recitation of Lucretia's every thought, to be a bit, well, overdone. Others argue that the sumptuous language perfectly befits a story about a complex and compassionate Renaissance duchess caught in the grip of a highly dangerous marriage.
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I rarely think much about the order of the books I read. To be honest, I'll google around a bit, come up with a handful of new titles, reserve them on my library app, and read them in whatever order they drop into my phone. There's no rhyme or reason to my flow, which is fine with me. I rarely think about it.
But reading these two books back to back was a gift. Their very different styles and story lines create a radical contrast that intensifies the beauty of each book. Tiny Beautiful Things washes me in a clean white light; Dear Sugar's kind words fill my heart with the music of emotional care and remind me of how much we all gain when we treat one another with kindness and compassion.
Alternatively, The Marriage Portrait launches me into a nightmare of the many horrible ways that power corrupts humans, and particularly, how women - young girls! - have been used throughout history in men's games of control and domination without any regard for their own wishes, their own safety, their own lives. But still, in the midst of Lucretia's darkest moments, she discovers helpers, people even more powerless than she who still find ways to lend her a hand. And she is grateful.
And that is perhaps the most beautiful treasure of reading these two books in sequence - the soul tie between Dear Sugar and Lucretia. Both kind-hearted women remind me that of all the things we can choose to offer this world, compassion is the best, most necessary gift.
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My 2023 book reviews:
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