MIDDLE SPOON, enjoyable novel of throuplehood's pains and problems

MIDDLE SPOON
ALEJANDRO VARELA
Viking Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2025!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A whipsmart, blazingly funny novel about heartbreak, unconventional love, and the way society could be, from National Book Award finalist Alejandro Varela

The narrator of Middle Spoon appears to be living the dream: He has a doting husband, two precocious children, all the comforts of a quiet bourgeois life—and a sexy younger boyfriend to accompany him to farmers markets and cocktail parties. But when his boyfriend abruptly dumps him, he spirals into heartbreak for the first time and must confront a world still struggling to understand polyamorous relationships. Faced with the judgment of friends and the sting of rejection, he’s left to wonder if sharing a life with both his family and his lover could ever truly be possible.

With a big heart and just the right dose of the anxieties that define the modern era, Middle Spoon skewers the unspoken rules we still live by—from taboos around intimacy to the shortcomings of Oscar season, pop culture, and gluten-free food—offering a surprising perspective on love, loss, and reinvention. Equal parts heart-wrenching and uproariously funny, Middle Spoon is for anyone who has longed, nursed a broken heart, or grappled with love at its messiest.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: You know that break-up letter you never sent? The one you found a while later when you were calmer? You remember how that felt, reading the minute-by-minute lavage of your just-lanced boil of hurt and anger?

Now it's a récit! A really long one, but that's what it is. Everything, not just the narration but every thought, feeling, event, opinion, is entirely the (unnamed, how much more evidence of it being a récit can one have?) narrator's. This is not entirely a good, or a bad, thing. It's fun when the narrator is processing why the departed party of the third part in the dissolved throuple, Ben, would just...dump him. (I have thoughts on this.) It's fun when he processes his rage at and hatred for the same groups I hate and rage over. Gluten-free food IS a satanic scheme to immiserate the planet further.

It is also, as a result of being so much up the narrator's tailpipe, a longer read than one would first think. I took a week to finish it. The intense angst, the ongoing anxiety issues...all are real, honest, told to us with sensitive thought before presenting them; and I want to shake this self-absorbed yutz until his eyes roll in opposite directions for being clueless and insensitive.

Well done, Author Varela! He evokes a very powerful reaction. Like The Town of Babylon, I had to reach into my reactions to fully experience the events portrayed...no surface-skating will do. Effort put in generates pleasure offered up, though. Ben never responds to these emails, written at the behest of the narrator's therapist but never sent; yet his text suggests he's either spoken to Ben or to his therapist to think through what Ben's reasons might be. I get it. It's the narrator's head, it's not meant to be in shared space. It's a récit!

But it's also the narrator. He is very much the guy you know who really doesn't realize how self-absorbed he is. He writes scathing letters to the Oscars showrunners because of things he doesn't like. Okay, he doesn't send them but—dude! I'm aware it's perceived as a man thing to be self-absorbed, but it's really a cultural universal far as I can see; still, what was Ben thinking? (We never find out.)

What else happens as a result of spending over 300pp in the narrator's head is that it feels like a hundred pages shoulda been condensed out of the count. It's a lot. It's fun, and the ending worked for my grinchly heart, but this is a time when a bit less would've said more.

A story I liked, a narrator I didn't much, and an ending I enjoyed. I call it another win for Author Varela.

FLYING SOLO, charming story of adults in the midst of Life and love

FLYING SOLO
LINDA HOLMES
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 Kindle edition, available now

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman returns to her small Maine hometown, uncovering family secrets that take her on a journey of self-discovery and new love, in this warm and charming novel from the New York Times best-selling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over.

Smarting from her recently cancelled wedding and about to turn 40, Laurie Sassalyn returns to her Maine hometown of Calcasset to handle the estate of her great-aunt Dot, a spirited adventurer who lived to be 90. Along with boxes of Polaroids and pottery, a mysterious wooden duck shows up at the bottom of a cedar chest. Laurie’s curiosity is piqued, especially after she finds a love letter to the never-married Dot that ends with the line, “And anyway, if you’re ever desperate, there are always ducks, darling.”

Laurie is told that the duck has no financial value. But after it disappears under suspicious circumstances, she feels compelled to figure out why anyone would steal a wooden duck — and why Dot kept it hidden away in the first place. Suddenly Laurie finds herself swept up in a righteous caper that has her negotiating with antiques dealers and con artists, going on after-hours dates at the local library, and reconnecting with her oldest friend and first love. Desperate to uncover her great-aunt’s secrets, Laurie must reckon with her past, her future, and ultimately embrace her own vision of flying solo.

I CHECKED THIS OUT FROM THE LIBRARY. THANK GOODNESS THEY EXIST. BUYING EVERY BOOK I WANT TO READ WOULD BE RUINOUS!

My Review: There's something really wonderful about reading stories that center your own concerns. I'm older than most of these characters, younger than a few, but they're not just starting out, figuring out Life, for the first time. They're part of it, settled into it, and now...there needs to be More.

Laurie and Nick dated eons ago, fell out of touch, and now that Laurie's back in their hometown to settle up her Aunt Dot's estate, she's back in touch with Nick because...well, because she wants to be. Because he wants to be, too. They're grownups with crack-ups in their pasts. They're adult children of people they love and care for. They're professionals and they're nice people.

And they're still...again...relearning how to be...in love. With each other, with their wildly separate lives and their mutually exclusive homes. They are, in short, deeply relatable to me. This book came to me as a not-quite recommendation from a LibraryThing friend who read it and resonated to its companionate themes. I'm resonating to the, well, the desire to make a relationship work that has a lot of strange contours to it and that precludes cohabitation for the foreseeable future. But is still a full, fun, vibrant, living relationship. It's not that common to see this kind of thing in fiction, though I'm aware that it exists in reality.

What happens in the course of Nick and Laurie's rediscovery of each other is a story that weaves together the best of humanity...generous, kind, unselfish souls sharing gladly all that they're asked for, looking for ways to give even more...and the worst, the dishonest and selfish impulse to lie and cheat and steal. In the course of that element of the story being resolved, in a believable way, these two main charatcers go on the real voyage of discovery inside themselves and in relation to the many, many people in their orbit.

I found a lot to enjoy in this read. I laughed out loud at Author Holmes' trademark funny lines:

“...we were pretty much out of cabinet space between the actual dishes and the food dehydrator he had bought himself and then used to make jerky a total of two—as in ‘one, two’—times.”

“How was the jerky?”

“Wretched. It tasted like wet cigarettes. We could have used it to repel raccoons.”

–and–

“...But yes, she started doing senior synchronized swimming at the Sarasota Y recently. She’s going to be in a recital. The theme is Hooray for Hollywood.”

The sound Dot made was closer to a hoot than a laugh. “Good for her. Whatever it takes to get your legs over your head.”

Fun, funny stuff that totally makes sense to someone who lives in an assisted living facility, and regulary talks about it to someone who doesn't. Author Holmes never stints on the real-life elements of her stories, so far at least, and we should all pray to the Muses she never tries to.

The real-life stuff's not *all* fun, of course, and there's a lot of relatable material in that as well:

“This is just a gruesome job. I feel so bad, like a grave robber.”

{The reseller} nodded. “You are far from a grave robber. Remember, she had these things for as long as she needed them, and they probably brought her a lot of happiness. But they most likely won’t bring you any, so there’s not a lot to gain from your coming down hard on yourself because you want to let stuff go.”

–and–

“Nah. Believe me, you don’t want to get married if the marriage you’re going to have is not the same marriage as the one you’d like to have.”

It's not deathless prose that stuns with its lapidary gleam and brilliance; it's the way your smarter-than-you friend with the sense of humor talks sense into you when you're falling off of/under/for something. It's comfortable, comforting, and relatable in the best ways.

It's a book I'm glad I read by an author I'm glad is getting contracts. That's more than enough for me right this minute. It felt like a slightly selfish, wicked little gift I was giving myself, reading this pleasant tale about people like me with concerns I could relate to. Giving it a few hours made a whole bunch more of them more pleasant, and that's worth four starts and a thank you every day.