Popular Fiction Archives — Keeping Up With The Penguins

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One Day – David Nicholls

May 27, 2025 / Sheree / 1 Comment

The premise of One Day is laid out in the title. The story starts with an apparent one night stand on St Swithins D ay, in July 1988 in Edinburgh, and then revisits the characters on that day each year for twenty years. The reader sees their lives change and their relationship evolve through vignettes, without any other window into the events that shape them.

Now there’s a big Twist(TM) towards the end of One Day that reveals why the story is told that way. I’m going to do my best not to spoil it for you, as it wasn’t spoiled for me before I read it, but the author David Nicholls doesn’t seem that concerned. After all, he’s made it pretty clear in interviews, talking about drawing inspiration from a particular passage in Thomas Hardy’s Tess Of Thee D’Urbervilles (which he also uses as an epigraph for Part 5 of the novel):

She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year;… her own birthday; and every other day individualised by incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?

Nicholls does a surprisingly good job of maintaining the through-line in One Day. I’d expected it to feel jerky going from year to year so quickly without the filler, with lots of clumsy exposition to show what’s happened in between, but he manages it relatively smoothly and without fuss.

The central characters are definite ‘types’ – Earnest Emma and Dapper Daxter – without descending into cliche. They experience a natural trajectory of growth and evolution over the years, to which the reader bears witness; again, it was a surprise and a relief to see that Nicholls didn’t have to stagnate their personalities to keep the thread strong through his strange timeline. The push-pull of their relationship to each other has strong Normal People vibes (if Sally Rooney didn’t use this book as inspiration, I’ll eat my hat). They get further and further away from each other, and just as you think all hope is lost…

… well, again, I can’t answer that without spoiling One Day for you. The ending is a huge bummer, I will say that much. HUGE. A critic for The London Paper summed it up well: “[One Day] may be a love story, but it’s no fairytale: Nicholls doesn’t shy away from the harsh side of growing up, the disillusionment, regrets, and random cruelty of life,”. That said, it’s also strangely funny. There were multiple moments that made me chortle, usually where the central characters ribbed each other in dialogue. So, I can confidently say that One Day will take you through the full range of human emotion.

In the end, it’s the conceit that makes this an interesting novel. An otherwise standard tragic love story is given an intriguing twist in its telling, and that’s the strongest thing to recommend. If you haven’t read it yet, I’d get on it quick before it’s totally spoiled for you – the fact that you and I have escaped spoilers until now is a miracle in and of itself.

Read One Day on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of One Day:

“Should have dropped this book faster than Dex drops his seemingly thousands of lovers. Truly a sad waste of time. Both him, Emma and the book.” – North
“The only nice thing to say about it were the very british sounding quips and replies to light up the depressing atmosphere of two unlikable persons making incomprehensibly stupid decisions for the lengthening of the story’s sake.” – Gisela Qasim
“If these characters, all really caricatures, represent the British, no wonder they no longer have an empire!” – N&JM
“The only reason I kept reading it was because I was hoping that the two main characters would get drunk and pass out in bed and their lit cigarettes would burn the house down and they would both be dead… I wrote a note in the cover that said “read at your own risk – this book sucks” and left it in an airport. I’ll probably be arrested for terrorism.” – K. Mag

The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid

November 19, 2024 / Sheree / 0 Comments

I can’t even imagine how chronically offline you’d have to be not to have encountered The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo. This is THE #BookTok best-seller, a historical romance (of sorts) that every book girlie worth her salt is reading.

The timeline of The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo stretches from the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1950s through to the present(ish) day. A former It Girl, now 79 years old, is giving her final interview, telling her whole life story from start to finish – including the dirty details of each of her seven (count ’em!) marriages. You don’t get prizes for guessing that Reid was inspired by the real-life story of Elizabeth Taylor (married eight times, to seven different men), and also Ava Gardner, who famously revealed all of her secrets to a journalist towards the end of her life.

The titular film star, Evelyn, has outlived every single one of her husbands – and her only daughter, come to that. This goes some way to explaining why she’s finally coming forward to share the truth behind the headlines: no one remains to contradict her side of the story. She’s working another angle too, though, one that Reid teases the reader with for the first two-thirds of the novel.

And who is the lucky journalist who gets to break the Evelyn Hugo story? A relative unknown, Monique Grant, who writes puff pieces for high-end magazine Vivant. Evelyn has picked her out of obscurity and offered her – and only her – full access to her life. Everyone’s baffled as to why Evelyn would want Monique (including Monique herself), but they’re willing to go along with it, knowing that the story will bring in big bucks, no matter who tells it.

The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo is split into seven parts, each named for one of the titular husbands. Each section has a descriptor that hints at Evelyn’s experience of that particular marriage: “Goddamn Don Adler”, for instance, or “Brilliant, kindhearted, tortured Harry Cameron”.

At first, Monique frames the story for the reader as seeking an answer to one big question: who was the true love of Evelyn’s life? The thing is, that becomes abundantly obvious very quickly and that “big” question is completely answered before you reach the halfway point. You’d think The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo might run out of steam after that, but Reid has the talent to keep it going, and there are many other questions and answers still to come.

I will mention here that Evelyn’s supposedly-glamorous life wasn’t all smooth sailing, and so the content of The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo warrants a few trigger warnings (domestic violence, sexual abuse and exploitation, abortion, grief, terminal illness, suicide, and substance abuse – not all at the same time, thank goodness). Also, I must say I’m surprised at how little the AIDS crisis features in the narrative, given the themes of the book and the time period over which it takes place – Stonewall gets half a chapter, but AIDS rates only a passing mention.

Reid does her best to make the attention-grabbing title and the larger-than-life conceit of seven husbands feel believable for the reader, but inevitably it does start to seem – by around husband 4 or 5 – that Evelyn can see no other solution to a problem than to marry it. When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, I suppose. There’s also a bit of a glut of deaths towards the end. Of course, that’s realistic for most people as they age, but none of the doomed characters are passing peacefully in their sleep – they’re all very dramatic deaths, told in rapid succession.

Those are my only real criticisms of The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo – it’s thoroughly readable, intriguing and compelling. Not only is its #BookTok popularity warranted, I think that it might actually be a force for good in society at large, as an introductory lesson to thinking critically about celebrity culture, and media literacy. Evelyn is unabashed and forthright about how she manipulates the media and her public image to her benefit, so maybe readers who might have otherwise unquestioningly accepted on-set romances and ‘irreconcilable differences’ divorces will be prompted to think more deeply about who is selling them the story and why.

The big question that remains for me is how has The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo not been adapted for the screen yet?? All of the elements are there: good looking women, lots of sex, glamour, scandal, a progressive message, and – even if it had none of those – its popularity on social media would surely guarantee bums on seats. A television adaptation was announced back in 2019, but Reid said in an interview in 2021 that the rights were no longer owned by that production company and it would be made elsewhere. In 2022, Netflix announced that they’d be adapting the novel into a feature film, but I haven’t found any concrete updates since then. So, what gives? Whenever it happens, I’ll definitely be watching.

My favourite Amazon reviews of The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo:

“”She couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag!” “It was as clear as the nose on her face!” Oh, please, spare me. The writing was flat as a pancake.” – Andrea Elise
“I never would have wasted 1 minute of my time if I had know this book is about lesbians and homosexuals.” – Amazon Customer
“I couldnt finish the book.
The character was not likable.
The husbands were worse.” – S.Marinak
“Shallow, repetitive, poor writing, poor layout, poor story progression. Poor reader, condemned to pay a small fortune for this tripe.” – Book Keeper

The Reading List – Sara Nisha Adams

September 17, 2024 / Sheree / 0 Comments

There’s nothing wrong with preaching to the choir now and then, and that’s what The Reading List does. It’s a cozy, warm-hearted book about the power of books to inspire and connect, so it’s not hard to see why booklovers would want to read it. It’s also not hard to see how debut author Sara Nisha Adams was inspired by her own experiences of connecting with her grandfather through a shared love of literature.

At the beginning of The Reading List, we’re introduced to two people living very different lives in the suburb of Wembley in London. Mukesh is a widower living a life of quiet grief in the absence of his late wife, constantly fussed over by his three daughters and increasingly baffled by his faltering attempts to connect with his bookworm granddaughter. Aleisha is in her late teens, working in her local library (a job she only took because a retail position at Top Shop was already taken), gradually becoming more isolated from her friends as her mother’s mental illness takes its toll on the family.

Mukesh heads to the library, where Aleisha works, in the hopes of finding a book to read – maybe it will help him feel closer to his late wife, or failing that, give him something to talk to his granddaughter about. Aleisha is rather rude to him, but has the decency to feel quite guilty about it afterwards. When she finds a list scribbled on a piece of paper slipped into a copy of a library book, she realises it’s a list of book recommendations – exactly the thing Mukesh was after before she brushed him off. She decides to read the books herself, and recommend them one by one to Mukesh, to make amends.

Of course, you’re wondering by now which books make the cut for the titular reading list. Don’t worry, it’s not a spoiler, so I’ll give them to you here:

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (which I reviewed here)
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (which I reviewed here)
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (which I reviewed here)
Life Of Pi by Yann Martel
Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen (which I reviewed here)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (which I reviewed here)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (which I reviewed here)
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

So, I guess the first thing you need to know is that The Reading List is not a book about book lovers. It’s more a book about people taking their first tentative steps towards becoming recreational readers (which makes the fact that one of the characters is supposed to be a librarian quite strange – find me a real life librarian who’s not a reader and I’ll eat my hat). So, it’s not exactly relatable for the audience it’s likely to draw in, who (I assume) would largely be die-hard bookworms already.

Secondly, The Reading List feels like a very unrealistic portrayal of what it’s like to work in a library. I don’t know any librarian who has time to feel bored on the job, let alone time to sit back and read. The budget cuts and ever-looming threat of branch closure felt all-too-real, though.

Thirdly, The Reading List turns into a bit of a mystery, which isn’t really signposted until towards the end. There’s a Big Reveal as to who wrote and distributed the reading list, but it feels like an answer to a question that I wasn’t really asking? I would’ve happily read this one assuming that the list was just a nice little nod from the universe, a convenient conceit for a cozy novel, without needing its origins to be revealed at all.

Oh, and there aren’t any content warnings on the cover or the opening pages, but there’s a very intense suicide, which definitely warrants one.

All of this might be making me sound like a cynical snot, which is definitely not in the spirit of The Reading List. I will concede that when Mukesh and Aleisha connect, their interactions are very sweet, and I love the friendship that forms between them. Both of them are grieving in their own way (Mukesh his wife, and Aleisha the youth and home life she could have had if not for her mother’s illness), and books are a wonderful escape for both of them, as well as an opportunity to find the common ground and support they need from others to get through the tough times.

And, naturally, it inspired me to compose my own version of the reading list, books I would recommend to bring people together and offer windows into different worlds:

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood (which I reviewed here)
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (which I reviewed here)
The One-Hundred-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson (which I reviewed here)
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (which I reviewed here)
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (which I reviewed here)
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (which I reviewed here)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (which I reviewed here)
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (which I reviewed here)

The Reading List is very earnest, a little saccharine, occasionally wistful, and mostly cozy – but, most importantly, it’s a testament to the importance of libraries and access to stories. It’s one to pick up when you want a feel-good read that won’t challenge your mind too much.

Read The Reading List on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)

My favourite Amazon reviews of The Reading List:

“It is so boring , nothing happens , just words and more words on paper!” – Shopping is a hobby too
“The whinging mother who falls apart after her husband departs (who can blame him?) needs a kick up the backside – I wanted to scream “man up/woman up – fg swhats the matter with you. Her awful lacking-depth children and one suicide – where did that come from? The only remotely interesting bit was the mention of the other books – though if these people cant learn from life they cant learn from these novels. Straight to the charity shop.” – M. Johnson
“This book is good for one thing. The bin! Poor prose. Weak storyline with characters that all seem pathetic. If I could give it less than one star, I would.” – C A
“Too bad this writer thinks, “Pride and Prejudice” is cheesy and her characters wont be able to relate to Regency women while having no trouble relating to boys on boats with tigers.” – Della

Icebreaker – Hannah Grace

August 13, 2024 / Sheree / 0 Comments

#Bookstagram made me do it! I’ve been scrolling past fellow fans of spicy reads raving about Icebreaker for nearly two years now, and they wore me down. I’m finally giving this college sports romance a go!

Icebreaker has all the hallmarks of a #BookTokSensation novel. There’s the cutesy cartoon cover that belies the spiciness of the content, the shameless marketing of the trope contained therein (“frenemies-to-lovers”, as one of the characters actually describes it in the narrative), and a helpful playlist of Vibe-appropriate songs in the front. It’s sold over a million copies worldwide, so the formula clearly works!

The story is told through chapters alternating the points of view of the romantic leads. Anastasia is a figure skater at the University of California, Maple Hills, with her sights set on an Olympic medal with her skating partner Aaron. But he’s not the hero of this story: that would be Nathan, a hockey player headed for the NHL after graduation. They’re thrown together when a college prank goes wrong and puts the hockey training rink out of action for a season. Figure skaters and hockey players collide, and sparks fly.

Anastasia and Nathan have a series of antagonistic-but-sexually-charged encounters, before finally consummating their situation at a rowdy party (romantic, eh?). Anastasia is mortified by her lack of self-control, and tries her best to avoid Nathan, but naturally the plot keeps throwing them together. Her skating partner becomes increasingly jealous, and when he gets injured off the ice, he blames Nathan. Nathan is innocent, but cops the blame anyway to stop it being directed elsewhere.

Icebreaker gets a bit convoluted from here, but it boils down to Nathan offering to fill in for Aaron as Anastasia’s skating partner until his injury heals, and their relationship develops in leaps and bounds as Anastasia realises that her partnership with Aaron isn’t as healthy as she once thought.

My fellow #Bookstagrammers weren’t lying: the spice in Icebreaker is excellent. Grace includes only the bare minimum of ice skating and hockey talk, basically using the sports simply to pad out the sex and the lovey-dovey bits. I was very grateful to Grace for avoiding the sports info-dump, and focusing instead on the A+ banter and tension.

I did have some trouble keeping all of the hockey players on Nathan’s team straight. There seems to be a lot of them (granted, I don’t know how many players are actually supposed to be on a hockey team, so maybe that’s normal?). Henry was an absolute gem, my favourite side character, so he stood out, but the rest of them blurred into one at times. I was particularly frustrated by the choice to have a character named Robbie and a separate character named Bobby – that just seems needlessly confusing.

Speaking of Robbie: Icebreaker has possibly the best representation of a wheelchair user that I’ve seen in contemporary fiction. Robbie is a full and contributing part of the team as assistant coach, and his team loves and respects him rather than treating him like a mascot or an object of pity. His spinal cord injury is explained without being turned into a tragic back-story or used as fuel for a main character’s development. He is a well-rounded character, a love interest in his own right(! which is all too rare for characters who live with a disability), and his use of mobility aids and specific accessibility needs are simply a fact of his life. Honestly, my hat goes off to Grace – even if the spice hadn’t been on point in Icebreaker, I’d be singing her praises for Robbie’s depiction alone.

It wouldn’t be a #BookTokSensation novel if it didn’t at least nudge some potentially-triggering topics, so here’s a content warning for disordered eating. Also, if you like to see manipulative man-boys get their comeuppance, you might need to temper your expectations, because Aaron gets off pretty lightly after a prolonged campaign of gaslighting, coercive control, and narcissism.

Overall, Icebreaker is a completely unrealistic wish-fulfillment spicy romance novel, and I won’t have anyone disparage it on those grounds. It does exactly what it does on the tin, and it does it well. It’s a delightful, satisfying read – one million #Bookstagrammers can’t be wrong!

My favourite Amazon reviews of Icebreaker:

“i genuinely think the one direction fanfic i wrote when i was 13 was better than this. and my fanfic involved me driving off a cliff and coming back as a ghost to haunt niall” – jhanvi
“It was okay but literally threes no plot it’s just intercourse.” – Good👍
“I have no words, I am baffled at how far human literature has sunken to this abhorrence of the english language. I can sit through a lot, and I mean a lot, and if put me in a room with this book and locked me in, I would commit heinous crimes.” – lily n

Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows – Balli Kaur Jaswal

April 23, 2024 / Sheree / 0 Comments

If the title of Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows doesn’t catch your eye, I don’t know how to help you. Knowing nothing else about this book, I knew I had to read it. Somehow, the title raises a bunch of questions, but at the same time it does exactly what it says on the tin. Brilliant!

If I had to sum up the thesis of Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, I’d say it’s: every woman has a hidden life, and every community has things they don’t talk about. Sometimes, those secrets collide.

Nikki is a twenty-something woman living in London, straddling the worlds of her immigrant parents and her modern contemporaries. She’s a bit directionless (as twenty-somethings tend to be), having dropped out of law school to ‘find her passion’. That search has taken her to a small apartment above a pub where she works a few nights each week, much to her family’s chagrin.

Nikki’s sister has chosen a different path: a respectable profession (nursing) and entering into the marriage market. She asks Nikki to post an ad on a Southall temple message board for young people seeking arranged marriages, and there Nikki finds an intriguing ad of her own. The Sikh Community Association is seeking a creative writing teacher to teach story writing to women – and Nikki, out of curiosity more than anything, takes the job.

But this is Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, so I’m sure you can guess that the storytelling workshop doesn’t work out exactly the way Nikki expects. The proper Sikh widows who attend the class are barely literate, and they’re expecting to learn the English alphabet and grammar, not narrative perspective and literary style. They soon discover, thanks to a gag gift they discover on Nikki’s desk, the world of erotic stories, and realise they’d have a lot more fun telling their own than learning their ABCs.

The erotic stories these Punjabi widows tell aren’t just wink-wink euphemistically sexy – they’re straight up spicy. It turns out these women are hiding a lot under their white dupattas. As the women delve deeper into their fantasies and the radical act of openly communicating their desires, Nikki grows concerned about the community’s reaction to her classes – specifically the Brotherhood, the young men who style themselves as the ‘moral police’.

The title of Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows might mislead some readers (it misled me, I’m not too proud to admit it) into thinking this is purely a comedic novel, an older-women-behaving-badly romp with lots of literal lols. It’s definitely entertaining, but it’s also meaningful, and there’s a lot of depth to it if you’re reading it as a feminist text. It’s a book about how women experience and express desire in cultures that are policed by men. It’s about sexuality as a source of confidence, both in and out of the bedroom. And it’s about the power to determine one’s own life, and pursue one’s own happiness.

I particularly appreciated the diversity of the arranged marriages depicted in Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows – both how they happen, and how they turn out. For a long time, the dominant Anglo narrative about arranged marriages was that they were universally awful (especially for women), and shackled two people together for life, site unseen, simply because their parents said so. Then, as far as I can see, there was a bit of an over-correction, and we had a run of stories about modern arranged marriages that worked perfectly because the couple fell in love for real. In Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, there are both very traditional arranged marriages and more contemporary and flexible arranged marriages, ones that work well and ones that don’t. More diversity in our perspective and understanding can only be a good thing, and this book definitely contributes to that.

Reese Witherspoon picked Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows for her reading list in 2018, and it’s easy to see why. As she said, it’s “a mystery, a romance, a family drama… and yes it’s 🔥 🔥 🔥!” – total Reese catnip.

Read Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows on audiobook via Libro.fm here.