Susan Coll

We meet Cassie when she has been married to Richard for 20 years and when she has just taken her daughter, Vera, to start college. Richard, a weatherman, who has gone from being a successful weatherman for many years to now living in the basement of their home and being uncommunicative with Cassie during this seclusion. She does bring him food and tries to get him to open up, but he only talks about weather and forecasting weather online in his basement studio. Cassie is fed up and walks out show more on Richard a few days before Christmas. She packs what she thinks she needs along with her new puppy, Luna. She then heads to her aunt and uncle who have raised her since the death of her parents from a bridge collapse when she was a toddler. She has always been curious about the accident, but her aunt would not share. She spends one night with them and leaves the next day to seek answers. She travels to the West Virginia town where the bridge was located. She stays at an historic hotel which sits on the river the bridge spanned over. She meets a gentleman who happens to be staying at the same hotel and they start up a conversation about the bridge and Mothman that people say they saw at the time of the collapse. He is quite familiar with this story and takes her to the museum about the Mothman and the bridge collapse. From this meeting, they seem to connect and from people she meets i this town, she is able to put together the pieces of the accident. She discerns that a) the Hoppity float toy her aunt was so upset about being destroyed by Luna was seen on the bank of this river after the collapse; b) the scars on her back that her aunt said was a result of falling into tomato stakes with wires poking out all over was more likely caused by someone who was scraped by metal pieces such as the ones from the collapse and c) there was a dog named Benjamin to a family that day with a young daughter who was clinging to this dog and brought out of river after the collapse. After confronting her aunt, we learn that her aunt had been told by professionals that Cassie would probably never remember any of this and it would be best not to discuss.

The story ends with Cassie leaving her husband, she telling her daughter what she has learned and her starting a connection with the man she met in West Virginia.

Kirkus: A writing professor haunted by mysteries in her past—and by moths, bridges, unfinished student stories, and her husband’s lover’s nightguard—returns to the scene of her parents’ deaths.

This book, which centers on uncanny coincidences and a fatal bridge collapse, enters the world in the immediate wake of the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, adding a poignant depth charge to the sophisticated dark comedy this author is known for. Coll, who successfully mined her career as a bookstore events planner in Bookish People (2022), now gives us Cassie Klein, an endearing woman who teaches fiction at a community college and finds herself losing sleep over the predicaments never resolved in student work: “Sometimes I wonder if I am anyone at all, or just a composite of the people I know and the stories I’ve read.” But Cassie is also carrying around a few stories of her own: the very public mistakes of her Richard Gere–look-alike weatherman husband, whose relationship with their supposed family friend is revealed when the woman’s dental apparatus shows up on Cassie’s nightstand, and the enigma of her parents’ deaths in a (real) 1967 West Virginia bridge collapse when she was just 2, the same one that inspired the 2002 movie The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere as a weatherman. As the book opens, a few days before Christmas, Cassie is heading over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to spend the holiday Jewish style (i.e., eating Chinese food) with the aunt and uncle who raised her, the former a beloved NPR personality. A moth in her car causes some problems on the way, and then, as usual, her aunt and uncle won’t answer a single question about what happened to her parents. But this time, Cassie tears out in her ancient Audi for West Virginia, where she will find everything she’s looking for, and then some. Coll’s deadpan narrative voice, once it hits you, is like when a stand-up comic finds your funny bone and you just can’t stop laughing. And yet the laughter never fails to somehow encompass the obduracy of loss and other woes of this mortal coil.

A kooky treasure, rooted in the deeply literary, slightly askew interior world that makes this author’s work so fine. show less

Clemi is not having a good day. When she arrives (only mildly hungover) for her fourth day on the job as the program director for a nonprofit literary group, her boss is missing, the office has been ransacked, and there’s a large cat – to which she is allergic – observing the proceedings with aplomb. And it goes downhill from there.

Susan Coll has wasted no time in setting the stage for chaos, quickly dropping a good-hearted (if somewhat naïve) young woman into the midst of it. With show more the annual awards banquet of the vaguely-named WLNP (turns out there’s a reason for this lack of clarity) set for just three days away, Clemi does her best to deal with a demanding award recipient, various phone calls seeking information about her AWOL boss, and the last-minute cancellation by the banquet’s star fund-raising attraction, who “has been relegated to eternal horizontality” via an inconvenient heart attack.

The fun here is watching Clemi try to muddle her way through the rest of the week, with occasional assistance from unexpected sources, but mostly trading one crisis for another. Along the way, Coll takes wonderfully sly shots at nonprofit groups willing to invest a hundred thousand dollars in a social event that might net them a fifth of that in usable donations, at the wealthy donors who see their affiliation with a “literary-adjacent” event as an excuse to drag out the diamonds and swan around being seen, as well as at wannabe writers, cutthroat agents, and prima donna authors.

The whole thing winds up with an awards banquet worthy of the Marx Brothers, complete with wandering clowns, a talking chicken, a couple of not-quite-undercover FBI agents, and a misplaced bar mitzvah.

All in all, a delightful romp.

(I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.) show less

This is such a funny book. I especially liked it because it is about readers, an indie bookstore, and is set in the Washington, DC, area (local to me). The protagonist is the 50-some-year-old Jewish bookstore proprietor Sophie Bernstein, recently widowed, who is totally overwhelmed by her job and simply wants to hide away in a secret alcove within her bookstore. In the meantime, a controversial poet, Raymond Chaucer, whom people generally hate because they believe he drove his wife to show more suicide, is set for an author talk at the store on an especially rainy day when the bookstore unexpectedly becomes overcrowded. Also going on is that Sophie’s son is trying to set her up on some dates via a senior citizen dating service.

Reading toward the end of this book is like waiting for all hell to break loose. However, this is not at all meant in at bad way. The story itself is perfect light reading for those who are looking to escape life’s problems for a while (just like Sophie Bernstein and myself).

I liked this book so much because I was feeling a deep need for a light, warm, humorous and uplifting story. This novel was spot on and filled the bill. I particularly liked the chapter about the malfunctioning vacuum cleaner because it was hilarious!

Grab a copy of this novel, and start laughing. You’ll be glad you did. show less

What a mess! Wait, I mean a zany, chaotic, maelstrom of humour, sadness, profundity (a little bit), and vacuum cleaners. Well, that does sound a bit like a mess. But it’s a mess with its heart in the right place. And that place, of course, is a bookstore. Sophie Bernstein’s bookstore seems larger than most independent bookstores that I’ve encountered, yet still not large enough for a children’s section. However, it does appear to have everything else, including a secret (by which I show more just mean forgotten) nook where Sophie might just have to go hide. Because everything, not just the store and her life and the lives of her staff, is a mess. There might as well be a hurricane and a total eclipse of the sun. Oh, there is. Yeah, everything is a total mess.

In truth, the story does suffer from its messy virtue. We get to learn very little about the many characters who periodically seem central to the plot. And even parts of the plot end up not really mattering to the overall plot. I’d even go so far as to say that the bookstore itself is not essential. This level of zaniness could happen in any setting of overworked colleagues, I suppose. Plus, is it really true that virtually everyone who works at or even frequents an independent bookstore is in the midst of writing a novel? That seems unlikely. Of course the novel I’m writing is…

It’s not great literature. It’s just a bit of fun. And with that proviso firmly in place, it’s easy to recommend. Enjoy the mess! show less