My Reading Life

Finished November 2025

I really struggled to like Broken Country, and for several reasons that ultimately made the book fall flat for me.

1. The infidelity theme—handled without sympathy or depth

I’m not opposed to stories about long-buried passions or the magnetic pull of first love. Done well—say, in the quiet, devastating elegance of my forever-heroine Anne Elliot—unfulfilled love can be the most romantic love of all. But Broken Country handles these themes in a way that felt careless, even frustrating.

The book seems to expect the reader to root for a rekindled romance that unfolds at the expense of a genuinely kind husband. Instead of evoking longing or emotional complexity, the affair just felt…thoughtless. Even when the narrative tried to make the passion feel urgent—“a stare that feels dangerous, intimate, intoxicating”—the writing never persuaded me. Good prose makes you feel; this felt more like the author telling me how I was supposed to feel.

2. A cast of largely unlikeable characters

I kept looking for someone, anyone, to anchor the story—a character I could root for or at least understand. Unfortunately, nearly everyone oscillates between selfish and strange. I couldn’t even understand why the protagonist abandoned her long-cherished opportunity at Oxford (which she wanted! which her family encouraged!) simply because her ex might be studying there too. That leap in logic never worked for me.

And then there’s the interpersonal dynamics, which bordered on the unbelievable. At one point, an ex-wife (Gabrielle’s) is earnestly telling a married woman (Beth)—who seems perfectly content in her marriage, or at least there’s no indication otherwise—that “it’s not too late” for her and the ex-husband. I mean…what? I remember actually pausing the audiobook just to take in the sheer audacity and implausibility of that moment.

And beyond that, Tessa Wolfe is written so extravagantly unhinged that I found myself thinking, “Okay, nobody is actually twisted like this, please.” With nearly every character either implausible or unappealing, it became harder and harder to stay emotionally invested.

3. The twist at the end—more contrived than compelling

There is a twist. And if I hadn’t already started feeling detached from the characters, maybe it would have landed better. But by the time it arrived, I honestly didn’t care much. It felt contrived—like something meant to inject drama rather than something that grew organically from the story.

4. My Audible experiment (the one part I didn’t mind)

I listened to most of this on Audible, even though I’m typically a deeply visual reader who loses attention quickly with audiobooks. To my surprise, I discovered that I can listen to books—and it’s quite liberating not to have to choose between reading and exercise!

That said, one female narrator voicing every single character—male and female—was…..a lot. Ordinarily, if this were a book I loved, I’d never put myself through that. But because I didn’t care deeply about this one, I found myself oddly okay with it. It was the rare case where the narration choice matched my level of emotional investment: minimal.

5. Why I picked it up—and what I learned

I chose this book because I felt behind on contemporary fiction, and I didn’t want my chronological reading plan to make me miss all the buzzy new releases. The rural England setting appealed to me. It was a Goodreads nominee. Reese Witherspoon recommended it. All the signs pointed to “Give it a try!”

But the experience reminded me that not all books that make a splash are destined to last. Perhaps it’s better, after all, to let contemporary novels prove themselves a bit—pass the test of time—before devoting precious reading hours to them. Ha ha.

Finished October, 2025

Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a quietly heartbreaking novel—one that takes the statistics and headlines we so easily skim over and turns them into human faces, voices, and memories. As Margaret Atwood once wrote, “The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others.” Books like this make those dreams real.

Through Nuri and Afra, a beekeeper and his wife forced to flee war-torn Aleppo, Lefteri shows how fragile safety can be. They could be any of us—living ordinary lives until the ground gives way. The novel reminds us that behind every news story is someone who once had a garden, a favorite meal, a friend’s laughter.

Drawing on her own experience volunteering in refugee camps in Greece, Lefteri writes with haunting authenticity about the couple’s perilous journey through Turkey and Greece toward the United Kingdom. What makes The Beekeeper of Aleppo so affecting is its gentleness amid devastation. Nuri and Afra are relatively privileged—educated, once financially comfortable—yet their path is marked by loss, humiliation, dislocation, and the quiet erosion of identity that follows exile.

Lefteri alternates chapters between the couple’s present life in the UK and their memories of Syria and the journey that brought them there. The structure mirrors the disorientation of trauma, where past and present blur and healing feels uncertain. The novel grapples with unbearable themes—grief over a child’s death, the numbness of post-traumatic stress—but also with resilience: the stubborn instinct to rebuild, to love again, and to find beauty in small acts of kindness. Amid bigotry and suspicion, Lefteri still finds light in human empathy, in the quiet gestures that remind us of our shared humanity.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo is not a difficult read stylistically—it’s a page-turner—but it leaves emotional aftershocks that linger. It reminds us that the life we take for granted can change in an instant, and that even amid ruin, tenderness survives. Like the bees Nuri tends, human beings, too, carry within them an instinct to create, to nurture, and to find their way home.