Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/12/14

Asha Jefferies, Ego Ride (Nettwerk Records)

Debut album from this Australian pop-princess, steeped in queer sensibilities, aimed at the straight-ahead alt-pop demographic that gravitates to Liz Phair and such, and look, it’s on the Nettwerk Records label, which always promises goodness. I’m way ahead of the curve on this one, which isn’t out until April, but Katy Perry did pretty much the same thing with her first LP, like I was already sick of hearing about her months before her LP came out. I’ll leave it to you to grok the parallels there, but in the meantime, this one’s a winner from the word go. “Stranger” starts off in a casual Portishead-ish direction, triple-layered with lazy synths, slow-bonked piano and orchestral statements, and even before Jefferies adds her Sarah McLachlan semi-yodel to it you’re already envisioning its future as a roll-credits fadeout to a major movie, something of that sort. The artiste’s people want me to talk about the single, “Keep My S—t Together,” a master-class mid-tempo chick-rocker a la Sheryl Crow, and so here goes: It’s pretty dreamy too. A+

Tutu Puoane, Wrapped in Rhythm (SoulFactory Records)

Another far-in-advance notice that’s well worth the wait. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, and a resident of Belgium since the early Aughts, this theatrical singer has collaborated with the Brussels Jazz Orchestra, Bert Joris, the Flemish Philharmonic, Tineke Postma, John Clayton, Metropole Orkest and Black Lives – from Generation to Generation. Her lilting soprano, which you’ll find here nestled among typical smoky room-jazz components like belled trumpets and such, is of the Toni Braxton variety, at least when she’s in a more or less post-bop groove, but as well — and this should come as no shock — she’s got a world-music side to her, half-singing about esoteric concepts like the promises the Earth made to her forebears and how she feels them in her feet. This is a lot more advanced than what Braxton fans have become accustomed to over the years, but Braxton is without a doubt the touchstone here. The passages glide and swoop and become more irresistible by the minute. A+

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Ack, ack, I’m supposed to be writing about albums coming out this Friday, Dec. 15, but I’ll bet you there aren’t any on my go-to critics’ cheat sheet! Yup, nope, just one, an LP titled One Wayne G, the sixth one from Canadian jangle-pop annoyance Mac DeMarco, but since I’d rather go get a root canal than — wait, never mind, he’s a cat person, he made a video about his cat, Pickles, who died recently, so in honor of Pickles I’ll go check out whatever YouTube has on this album. Huh, looks like he named all this album’s songs after the dates he wrote them. Here’s one of the dumb things, titled “20180512.” It’s really mellow and upbeat and he thankfully doesn’t sing; it’s like what you’d hear if Spyro Gyra wrote an elevator music song for a yoga retreat, so forget all this nonsense, I’ll look for something kind of normal at a little-known CD-release-information website called Amazon.com. Well well, the first thing I see is a soundtrack thing, titled Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street 2023 Broadway Cast Recording. Now I know what you’re thinking, you want to watch me predict what I think this album will sound like, as if I’m just here for your entertainment. Well, to heck with it, I’ll tell you, I predict it sounds like bad but important-sounding music from a Broadway play that people stopped going to see back in 2011. Et voila, that’s exactly it, the same music they played on the super-boring 2007 Stephen Sondheim/Johnny Depp film that was based on Christopher Boyd’s 1970 play. Josh Groban sings the Sweeney Todd parts in this one, not that it helps any.

• There are so few new CD releases coming out as the “countdown to Christmas” winds down that I think we may as well just talk about new country & western albums for the remainder of the column, because that’s all I’m really seeing. But before that, if you’re wondering why you don’t have as much fun during Christmas as you did when you were 11, it’s probably because the mass media wants you to think there really is a “countdown,” like you’re not actually having fun or experiencing the joy of camraderie yet, because the countdown is still going on. Or at least that’s what “they” want us to think. The truth is that the journey is the fun part. In fact, when HannuKwanzmas day actually arrives, that’s when the fun ends, you know? That’s when things really get stressful as you run around trying to get your relatives out of your house, returning gifts and whatever. So enjoy the season, fam, and in the meantime you might consider buying country singer Riley Green’s new LP, Ain’t My Last Rodeo. Green is of course a Jon Pardi wannabe, sounding sort of like Thomas Rhett or a tin-plated Merle Haggard, but at least it’s not Rascal Flatts, so count your blessings, cowpokes!

• Sticking with this week’s country music tangent, Earned It is the new album by Larry Fleet, who sounds like every modern male picker-grinner, and plus, he has a ZZ Top beard, at least at this writing. The title track is really bluegrass-y, which I respect, like, if Larry the Cable Guy could hold a tune it’d probably sound like this.

• We’ll wrap up this week’s horse-ropin’, chicken-pluckin’, pig-scramblin’ column with the new full-length from Nashville’s most famous “nepo baby,” Rosanne Cash! The album is called The Wheel, and the title track is actually pretty good, some busy finger-picking guitar-tronica. Imagine Wilson Phillips trying to be seriously country and you’d be in the ballpark.

The Little Liar, by Mitch Albom

The Little Liar, by Mitch Albom (Harper, 333 pages)

There’s a downside to being the author of a runaway bestseller like Tuesdays With Morrie. It’s that every book you write from that point on will be compared to the most successful one.

In Mitch Albom’s case, the success of his 1997 memoir about conversations he had with his former professor, who was dying of ALS, made him turn to fiction. While his subsequent books haven’t enjoyed the popularity of Tuesdays, which is among the best-selling memoirs of all time, Albom has a loyal following and continues to write columns and books. His latest, The Little Liar, is an imaginative and often troubling story that is part historical fiction and part morality play.

The titular character is an 11-year-old boy named Nico who, at the start of the novel, lives with his family in 1943 in Salonika, a city that at the time had the largest Jewish population in Greece. The Nazis have invaded and are driving Jewish families from their homes and into ghettos with the intent of sending them to concentration camps.

A Nazi officer recruits Nico to assure the families that they are merely being “resettled” and will have jobs and new homes in Poland. Nico is the ideal child for this job, as he is “a boy to be believed,” having no experience with lying; he is so honest naturally that he doesn’t fib even a little bit when asked, for example, if he has done the required reading in school, or if he was tagged in a game of chase. Nico’s believability is enhanced by his good looks: He is an extraordinarily beautiful child, so much so that strangers on the street stop to comment on his appearance.

And because he is so honest, Nico does not doubt the lies fed to him by a young Nazi officer named Udo, who promises Nico that his own family will be safe. Because he does not lie, he can’t envision that others do. So he willingly goes up and down the train platforms telling the anxious waiting families that he has heard that all will be well.

Things fall apart when Nico sees his own family loaded onto a train, and he finds out they are going not to new homes but to Auschwitz. Among them is Nico’s oldest brother, Sebastian, and a family friend, the same age as Nico, named Fannie.

The rest of the novel follows each of those characters — Nico, Sebastian, Fannie and Udo — throughout their lives, showing how Nico’s unintentional deceit affected all of them, even as adults.

These characters were invented by Albom, who said he got the idea for the novel after visiting a museum and learning that Jews were used to convince others to board the trains bound for death camps. “That perversion of truth, with life and death on the line, stayed with me for months and even years later,” Albom wrote in an author’s note.

Some of the characters in The Little Liar, however, were real people, including Katalin Karady, a Hungarian actress who used her fame and money to rescue 20 Jewish children who were about to be murdered by the Nazis.

The main conceit of the novel is that the story is told in first person by a mythological being: the Angel of Truth. This character comes from an ancient parable about how, when God was creating the Earth, he consulted angels with names like Mercy, Righteousness and Truth, and Truth was the only one who advised God not to create humans, because, as Truth said, they would tell lies.

“So what did the Lord do? He considered all that was said. Then He cast Truth out of heaven and threw him to the depths of the earth,” Albom writes.

This parable is not Albom’s creation but part of the Jewish tradition. But Albom makes Truth the storyteller, which allows for occasional soliloquies into the nature of truth and lies, e.g., “Truth is universal. You often hear that expression. Nonsense. Were I truly universal, there would be no disagreement over right and wrong, who deserves what, or what happiness means.” And, “Of all the lies you tell yourself, perhaps the most common is that, if you only do this or that, you will be accepted.”

As the novel went on, this narration started to feel a little contrived, but it all comes together with a clever ending that is surprising and satisfying. This is no small feat, given the dark subject matter that comprises most of the book, during the events of World War II and in the anger, bitterness and resentment that festers in later years.

As the characters travel different paths — Nico turning into another person altogether in an attempt to atone for his past — Albom explores moral questions such as whether there are sins that can’t be forgiven no matter what we do later in life, and whether any amount of atonement can release us from the torment of our own conscience. These are complex questions for the simple language used in this book, but Albom, like his teacher before him, has proven himself to be an exemplary storyteller. B+

Album Reviews 23/12/07

KO Mini, Chef’s Kiss (self-released)

We’re seriously just about at the point where there’s almost no need to list a music release’s record label when writing about its merits or lack thereof, given that so many artists are completely independent (if the vampires at Ticketmaster and such could be prevented from buying up concert tickets and scalping them we’d be even better off). Anyway, what drew me to this little X-rated bubblegum EP was its tease that the single, “stoptryingtohavesexwithme,” “pushes the boundary of how much blunt humor and simultaneous sex appeal you should put into a song.” In a word, I was anticipating something funny, which it isn’t; it’s more about cruel rejection, not that most leering, overstepping incels don’t deserve anything better, but the beat is cool enough, a lot of earthquakey Ed Banger booms going on underneath. It’s a club-banging, Lolita-voiced break from the usual trap oatmeal, which, I’m sure you know by now, I absolutely cannot stand. The playful, fluttering/soaring “Sorry In Advance” is definitely worth checking into if you have some spare Spotify space. A

Escuela Grind, DDEEAATHHMMEETTAALL (MNRK Heavy Records)

I didn’t mean to riff on yet another metal release this quarter, but seriously, folks, this time of year I get sent like 50 of them every five minutes, and as well in my defense, at least this one’s from a New England-based band, well, half of it’s from Pittsfield, Mass., anyhow, go Patriots, amirite fam? The roster is three boys and two girls, one of the latter being singer Katerina Economou, who sounds like the dude from Cannibal Corpse, sort of, but more like Quorthon, like one of those raspy mini-sized cave-monster guys from the Hobbit movie, and the music is, as promised, very grindcore, like the sort of music you picture your pet tarantula humming to itself while it walks across the table to surprise your mom. It’s pretty epic for what it is, I suppose, not that I’d ever want these people to get mad at me, and thus I may be lying. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Hello, everyone, how was your late/second Thanksgiving, mine was fine except for when I completely ruined the turkey gravy by following a recipe I found online, at the Betty Crocker website, believe it or not, and it basically said I should combine equal parts flour and butter/turkey/whatever slime, but I took the recipe seriously and basically ended up with a cake that tasted like turkey; I’ve decided to cut this horrible disaster into a bunch of small compact cakes and sell them as “Gobbler Twinkies,” watch this space for my initial public stock offering and get a prime seat on the victory train! In the meantime, Friday, Dec. 8, is the next date for new CD releases, and look at that, there are actual albums listed on my private, secret metacritic.com web page, a source that only professional music journalists like me are allowed to access unless you have a web browser! I’ll stick to tradition and get the album I don’t really want to even talk about out of the way first, that being Before And After, the ninety-bazillionth album from horrible-voiced Woodstock charlatan Neil Young! No, I’m kidding, you guys, his song “Ohio” was OK, I thought, and it’s still OK even though it came out before SnapChat or the macarena or even electricity for that matter, and “Rockin’ In The Free World” is pretty epic, despite the fact that his guitar solo, as always, sounded like a duck trying to imitate the Storage Wars auctioneer dude (hey, let me have a little fun while I still can, I’ll be spending the next two or three columns complaining about the fact that there are no new albums coming out aside from box sets and hamster-wheel-metal albums from Finland)! OK, let’s see if my stomach can even deal with this new album, which is composed of acoustic versions of his old songs, like “Burned” from when he was in Buffalo Springfield during the days of the Thomas Jefferson administration, and “Mother Earth” from his 1990 album, Ragged Glory. Here, let me check out his re-rub of his famous song “Birds” and give you my expert analysis: Ah, I’ve got it, it’s an acoustic version of it and is absolutely no better than the original. Aaand moving on.

• Oh, great, time again for me to pretend I know anything about modern bubble-pop or divas or gigantic twerking butts or whatever the 11-year-olds listen to when they troll each other on SnapChat, because look folks, Nicki Minaj is back with a new album, called Pink Friday 2! There’s an advance single here, called “For All The Barbz,” and it features Drake and Chief Keef! The rhymes Nicki contributes are mindlessly pornographic, which adds to the je ne sais quoi, you feel me, and one of the dudes is using Auto-Tune, because it’s still 2002, right? So glad I’m living in a timeline that favors quality over redundant quantity, I have to say.

• Just a second now, this might be OK, the new LP from Alison Goldfrapp, The Love Reinvention! You might know that she got her start by being featured on the 1994 Orbital album Snivilisation, meaning she was one of the first electronic guest-princesses; I have to hand it to her. The new single, “Every Little Drop,” is understated warehouse-rave fodder, which I’m always glad to hear, just prettiness and sexytime romping, but there are no gigantic twerking butts and porn lyrics, what’s a critic supposed to do with this.

• And finally it’s California metalcore band Atreyu, with their new full-length, The Beautiful Dark Of Life! Wow, I have no idea what they’re even doing on the new tune, “[i],” it’s like some sort of Echosmith chillwave thing, I don’t mind it.

John Abernathy You are Kind by Molly McGhee

Jonathan Abernathy is an unemployed college dropout, age 25, with no prospects for anything getting better — his “loans, IOUs, and bills so diverse ecologists would be within their jurisdiction to classify the collection as an ‘ecosystem.’”

He has a quarter of a million dollars in student loan debt (“with an APR so lethal it can kill within a week”) and inherited credit card debt from his parents “in the low six figures.”

Living in a basement apartment not much wider than the length of his body, Abernathy is so profoundly miserable that he is envious of his landlord going to work — “going somewhere where someone will tell her what to do. Then in exchange for this, they will give her money. Jonathan Abernathy would like to be told what to do in exchange for money.”

This is the set-up of Molly McGhee’s glorious debut novel, which paints a dystopian picture of what is commonly called late-stage capitalism and its effect on America’s underachieving young adults. Other than the misery of young people saddled with soul-crushing debt, there is little realism here, however. Abernathy lives in a world in which “dream auditors” infiltrate the dreams of sleeping citizens, this being possible because it has been discovered that “humanity shares a consciousness while it sleeps.”

People who are chosen to be dream auditors don special clothes and wander about the dreams of troubled sleepers, cleaning out the nightmarish stuff so that the person can sleep better and therefore be more productive at work — all the better for the economy. The service is much in demand by companies whose workforces “seem depleted.”

In this strange world, Jonathan Abernathy is recruited for an auditing job — appropriately enough, during his sleep. He’s desperate for the job because the alternative is selling hot dogs off a food truck, and this new job promises $20 a night (though, sadly, no health care) plus incremental student loan forgiveness and a temporary freeze on collections while he is employed.

So he’s grateful to have work, even if it’s strange and his co-worker/mentor, Kai, is even stranger. She is one of three women who populate Abernathy’s life, the others being his landlord, Kelly, and his neighbor, Rhoda, a single mother who always smells of pine and is in desperate circumstances of her own and, astonishingly, seems interested in him. Their relationship deepens as Jonathan becomes more entrenched in his job and continues with it despite troubling signs that everything might not turn out OK in the end, for anyone involved.

That is not a spoiler — the book begins even more ominously, with the line “Though it will take three years, from this moment, for death to act, Jonathan Abernathy will never live a life unmarked again. Death will be tethered to him as a shadow.” There are also some Jacob Marley-esque apparitions on the book’s cover.

Why read something that’s such a downer, especially during the holiday season? It’s a fair question, but in a world saturated with formulaic books, this is not one. Poor doomed Jonathan Abernathy, who earnestly recites affirmations to keep his spirits up (Jonathan Abernathy, you are strong! Jonathan Abernathy, you are brave! Jonathan Abernathy, there is nothing in life not meant for you!) gets our sympathy in part because McGhee convincingly paints him as a helpless pawn in the cold capitalist machine, and also because he is an orphan, both parents having died by suicide. These are odds not just stacked against him, but malevolently working to ruin him, as his new employer also seems to be.

At the same time, Abernathy has a sweet optimism that exists because of his willful oblivion. He wants to be a good person; he wants to be a good worker; he wants to be needed at work. (“He anticipates the feeling of being needed with the same fervor that he looks forward to arriving at a destination with air-conditioning after a long heat-soaked walk.”) But as it turns out, you can’t affirm yourself out of terrible things that have happened in the past, both your own, and that of people you know. And we keep reading, because we care about Jonathan Abernathy, and honestly, just want to know what happens to him. Closure matters.

This is McGhee’s first novel; she was working in a publishing house as she wrote it, and as such, the novel is polished in a way that some debut efforts aren’t. You can tell when someone spends their days immersed in words. You can also tell when someone is disillusioned with capitalism, as McGhee, like many of her generation, appears to be. She equates work with dreams, writing, “To work and to dream is to forget.” In this world, work is the merciless maw that consumes our hours, leaving precious little of the meaningful stuff. Is it preachy at times, and a bit too single-minded in insisting that Abernathy is a victim, devoid of any agency in his life? Of course. Is it also a book you will think about long after you’ve lent it to friends? That, too. B+

Album Reviews 23/11/30

CrowJane, Bound To Me (Kitten Robot Records)
I’d thought it’d happened a lot more recently, but it turns out I haven’t heard from this Los Angeles kook lady since the release of her Mater Dolorosa EP in October 2020, which I described using RIYL comparisons like Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten. In this new five-songer she’s aiming for Siouxsie Sioux’s brand of weirdness, or so it says on the thing in front of me, and that sort of ’80s-goth-pop epicness is prominent in the works here, helped out by some pretty sweeping orchestral layers and Blue Man Group-ish drum-thumping (I should probably also mention that it’s a really captivating, super-nice tune). Elsewhere we have “Ides Of March,” which is like Siousxsie in metal mode, just an outstanding wreck-stuff rockout that’s got a bit of KMGDM to it. I hadn’t detected such a high level of accessibility in her earlier EP, but this one is remarkably good, well worth checking out. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Maddi Ryan, Growing Pains (self-released)
In this EP I’m hearing a cross between Amy Grant and [place random anti-diva like Lorde here] undergirding the voice of this Boston-area singer, who racked up Country Act of the Year nominations at count-’em-three New England Music Awards events. Enough Kellie Pickler/Taylor Swift wannabes have dropped CDs on this desk that I’ve forgotten what real disappointment feels like, but stop the presses, this five-song EP is proof that this particular cowboy-booted Insta princess knows her way around a studio, or at least whom to seat at the mixing booth’s least rickety chair, whichever the case. “Wilderness” opens things with some Swift-in-Jewel-mode crooning atop an acoustic guitar line, her soprano aiming for the angsty, hormone-bending vibe that usually leads to a boring chorus, but instead she stays on top of it, adding a truly pleasing vocal harmony, then some floaty dobro and similar layerings as it eventually morphs into Norah Jones-ish Americana. She’s a serious contender, I kid you not. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, Dec. 1, is the next CD release day, ermagersh, where did the summer go, what are we even doing here, and now let’s riff on ancient legendary arena-rock band Genesis for a minute, because one of the new rock ’n’ roll CD releases you can buy this week is I/O, from original Genesis singing person Peter Gabriel, his first since, holy catfish, 2011! Like his Genesis-singing successor, Phil Collins, Gabriel is famous for writing dishwasher-safe AOR-pop for dentists’ offices and Dollar Tree stores, and he’s most famous for being the singing person in the song trenchcoat-wearing kickboxing-slacker John Cusack was playing on his boombox during the famous “why aren’t the cops grabbing that guy” scene in the 1989 movie Say Anything. That alone elevated his cred far higher than that of Popeye-The-Sailor-lookalike Phil Collins, whose 1980s hits were horrible enough, but in order to ensure his ”Worst Song Of All Time” achievement award — and most Xers and Boomers have subconsciously erased all this from memory — Collins participated in a duet with really bad singer Philip Bailey on the song “Easy Lover” from Bailey’s 1984 LP Chinese Wall. The only ’80s rock music fail that came anywhere close to unseating that tune as the, you know, Worst Song Of All Time, was Eddie Murphy’s hilariously hubristic fish-out-of-artistic-water laughingstock, “Party All The Time,” which saw the first time a record company ever called an emergency Auto-Tune guy to come in and clean up Murphy’s transparently off-key vocal, and let’s not forget the video for Billy Squier’s “Rock Me Tonight,” in which he pranced around a bedroom like a preteen girl overdosing on Flintstones vitamins, a cringe-gasm so explosive that Squier’s career instantly tanked faster than the Lusitania. But yes, Gabriel has always been borderline listenable in my book, like, “Games Without Frontiers” was OK, mostly because I, like everybody else, thought it was either Psychedelic Furs or Echo And The Bunnymen, who even knew, you know? But anyway, whatever, “Turn It On Again” was a cool Genesis song, even though Peter Gabriel wasn’t there at the time, so here we go, let’s have a look at what’s on this new Peter Gabriel album, and wait a second, two remixed versions of the kickoff single song, “Panopticom,” have been released thus far: the “Bright Side Mix” (done by Mark “Spike” Stent), and the “Dark Side Mix” (mixed by Tchad Blake), both of which were released in January of this year. The Bright Side Mix is OK; the song is important-sounding in a first-world-problems sort of way, studious Gabriel nonsense that’s kind of a chore to listen to, same as always.

• Love Minus Zero is a new collaborative project between electro-revival producer Tiga and Scottish producer Hudson Mohawke, who was part of the “wonky” techno scene (think slo-mo dubstep with a lot of distorted, wobbly dance beats) until the end of the Aughts. L’Ecstasy is their forthcoming debut full-length, which spotlights “Love Minus Zero,” a track that’s a few years old, a really cool, hypnotic dance joint combining dubstep, trance and tribal, you’d probably like it.

• We Owe is the solo project of Swans’ Christopher Pravdica, whose new LP Major Inconvenience uses such things as autoharp and djembe to make off-kilter tunes like the new “Time Suck,” a woozy, discordant, Throbbing Lobster-ish experiment.

• Lastly we have yet another Bandcamp mess to decipher: When No Birds Sang, a joint-effort album between grindcore outfit Full Of Hell and heavy shoegaze dudes Nothing. “Spend The Grace” is a skronky, apocalyptic, blissed-out noise exercise, but other than that it’s probably fine for bouncy-house parties.

The Wake-up Call by Beth O’Leary

If I were a trendy person, I would call this book “mid”: just fine, mediocre, middle of the road. The Wake-up Call is fine for what it is — a predictable entry in the women’s fiction category.

Maybe I shouldn’t have read this right after finishing Remarkably Bright Creatures, which is thoughtful, intelligent and unique; this is a very different kind of book, meant to be light and fun. And it was fun, but it’s also forgettable, sharing the same tired plot as so many other rom coms before it. I personally am tired of plots that only exist because the two main characters keep misunderstanding each other and have an unbelievable inability to communicate.

The book alternates chapters between main characters Lucas and Izzy. They hate each other! But do they? The premise is that they work together, and the previous Christmas Izzy had written a card to Lucas telling him she was interested in him. But, big shocker here, he never got the card! And thus ensues a year of miscommunication that so easily could have been rectified if Izzy had just talked about why she was so damn upset.

The hotel that they work at is a great setting, and the supporting characters are far more interesting than Izzy and Lucas. There are mysterious guests, quirky guests and lonely guests. The rest of the staff is more compelling than the main characters too.

And then there is the ring subplot; the hotel is going under, so they’re trying to sell off unclaimed items that guests have left behind. There are, somehow, several diamond rings. So the staff sets out to find the people who belong to the rings, and Izzy and Lucas turn it into a competition of sorts, and it ultimately leads to some surprises that had the potential to make the book different from others in this category but were handled in what seemed like a slapdash way.

Ultimately, I wish O’Leary had put more effort into the stories and people behind the rings and less into Izzy and Lucas’s many, many frustrating experiences together — frustrating to them and frustrating to the reader who just wants to shake them and say “Just speak out loud what is in your head and everyone will feel better!” C+

The Good Part by Sophie Cousens

Meanwhile, I devoured The Good Part. Also in the women’s fiction genre but with a much fresher take on relationships and a more thoughtful reflection on life, it was a captivating read. Were there predictable parts and unbelievable moments? Of course. Is the general trope similar to Big and 13 Going on 30? Sure. (Cousens noted as much in her author’s note.) But The Good Part offers a new twist, and Cousens’ writing is engrossing, moving the story along at a quick and entirely enjoyable pace.

Lucy Young is in her mid 20s, unhappy with her job, her dating life and her living situation. An encounter with a wishing machine prompts Lucy to wish that she could skip to the good part of her life. When she wakes up, it is 16 years in the future. Her body has changed, she has a good-looking husband, a nice house and an important job, and she’s the mother of two.

The rub here is that her memories between the time she made the wish and the present are gone. She has no idea how she got to where she is in life, and she doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t know how to do her job, manage new technology or parent her toddler daughter and 7-year-old son.

The dialogue between Lucy and her son Felix is hilarious. Felix knows right away that this isn’t his mom — this is an alien imposter. When she tells him what she thinks might have happened, he sets out to find the wishing machine that could transport her back to the time of life she left behind. The way their relationship develops over the span of the book is heartwarming and, more importantly, believable.

And of course Lucy also gets to know Sam, this stranger she apparently married and had children with. Sam handles her memory loss with the right combination of compassion and sadness. He reminds her of some of the things she’s been through in the past 16 years, and it’s not all good — which is seemingly why she skipped those parts. But it also means she missed out on some of the good stuff: meeting Sam, her wedding day, the births of her children. She’s left to wonder whether it was worth it.

The Good Part is the perfect combination of thought-provoking and funny, and the characters are loveable and real. It’s a stellar example of what women’s fiction has the potential to be. A

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