Always glad for books that spring up like daffodils

Though I know we could be scraping ice from windshields and shoveling walkways again any day now — and I’m not changing out my snow tires till May — spring does seem today to have really sprung. Birdsong, daffodils, green grass, crocuses. Could this really be it?

Have any good books sprung up in your life lately? I’ve had a few.

“Piglet,” a novel by Lottie Hazell, is terrific. Jennifer Weiner, author of “Good in Bed,” “In Her Shoes,” etc., writes in The New York Times Book Review: “If I owned a bookstore, I’d hand-sell ‘Piglet’ to everyone. Hazell’s prose is as tart and icy as lemon sorbet; her sentences are whipcord taut, drum tight. … The ‘will she or won’t she’ isn’t just about the man and the wedding. It’s about whether Piglet ends up embracing a big life, full of richness and variety and good things to eat, or if she lets herself be crammed into that too-small dress.”

The novel begins 98 days before Piglet’s wedding to her fiancé, Kit. There’s a heat wave and Piglet is food shopping, “the supermarket chill … welcome on her breastbone, her back.”

Everything seems to be going great in her life. Things are hunky-dory with the fiancé. They’ve just moved into a new house, and when we meet them, they’re busy preparing for a housewarming supper for six with a menu to die for. Piglet is a fabulous cook who loves to entertain, and Kit seems about as good-natured as they come — nothing not to like here at all. The couple has friends, money, loving family, a great sex life. It’s all good.

All good until page 19, when the reader is rather abruptly informed by the following, italicized, on an otherwise blank page: “He would tell her 13 days before the wedding, and she would feel his words lodge like a shard of bone between her ribs.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but I am the kind of person who, when presented with an obituary, wants to know — no, needs to know how the deceased actually died. I have done a little research and have discovered that I’m not alone in this somewhat peculiar propensity, but anyway, my point is: When confronted with the italicized statement on page 19, I was like, “Wait, what? What did he tell her? What happened? What did he do?”

Well, dear reader, I regret to inform you: I never found out. I never found out what Kit said or did that changed absolutely everything. But whatever it was, I will tell you that it throws a major monkey wrench into the thus-far smooth, previously humming-right-along machinery of the novel.

Oh, and then, on page 31 there’s this: “There were some things that you could not tell your friends. She knew that truths, once spoken, had the power to strip her of the life she had so carefully built, so smugly shared.”

What??

Filled with mouth-watering dishes and a narrator who is perennially, and for the most part unashamedly, ravenous, this is an odd and totally marvelous book. Piglet has an almost Bridget Jones-like lovableness and bounce, with a similar lightness and humor. Yet there is a darkness and an intensity here that you don’t find in Bridget Jones.

Lamorna Ash, author of “Dark, Salt, Clear,” comments: “It takes audacity and all kinds of courage to produce a novel as ferocious and weird as ‘Piglet.’ The narrative accelerates like nothing else I’ve read, opening onto dead-end domestic conformity and then driving us all the way out into the wildernesses, where the possibility for liberation and the fulfillment of desires might be discovered. It made me so hungry.”

Writes author Fran Littlewood, “Characters that pop, writing you could eat.”

Enticing and drool-inducing as are the dishes and desserts described in “Piglet,” I have to say that the emotional tension that builds over the course of the novel is enough to make one lose one’s appetite for the season. But truly, this is one of the best books I have devoured in some time. I highly recommend it.

I also recommend Kari Ferrell’s 2024 memoir, “You’ll Never Believe Me: A Life of Lies, Second Tries, and Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist.” I don’t know where I heard about this book — it may have been a blurb in The New Yorker — but it’s definitely worth a read, if only for the reason (and there are a good many reasons to read this book) that, at least initially, the narrator is so totally morally bankrupt. To the point where I found myself trying to think of a book in which the narrator is similarly untrustworthy, not in terms of telling readers the truth, but in terms of basic personal morality. The only one I could think of was the 1955 psychological thriller, “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” and subsequent books by Patricia Highsmith (which if you haven’t yet read, you must, immediately).

“You’ll Never Believe Me” is a memoir, though, whereas Ripley is fiction, and Kari Ferrell is basically, for the first two-thirds of the book, an unabashedly not-good person. But she tells it like it is. No sugar-coating the lies, manipulations and the broad extent of the crap she pulls.

Born in Jeollabuk-do, “a province in the southwestern part of South Korea roughly twice the size of Rhode Island,” Ferrell’s story is that she was adopted by a Mormon family in Utah.

“Most people can pinpoint the town they were born in, if not down to the specific hospital,” she writes, “but for me it was simply another unknown on a long list of unknowns. My birth parents were poor and couldn’t afford to take care of me and wanted to give me a better life. I got that better life when I was shipped off to America at five months old. The end.”

What does she do that makes her so bad? Well, I’ll tell you. She steals money from her friends, her family and her lovers, she cashes bad checks, she shoplifts, and she lies, lies, lies, and doesn’t seem to care a whit that she is an utterly untrustworthy, ungrateful daughter and friend.

Her take on Mormonism is interesting: “Like with any successful MLM, you have someone you’re trying to please, and someone who wants to please you, and the church banks on that hierarchy. It was like a MasterClass in the art of manipulation, and I was a star student with a front-row seat.”

But all that being said, Kari is snappy and witty and funny and compelling and a great storyteller, and you can’t help but want to know what caper she’s going to pull next and where on earth a person like her ends up in the final act. Oh, and the writing is really good. She ends up, no surprise, in jail, and eventually, thank heavens, therapy, and, for the most part, on her feet. Yes, finally, despite the rocky, slippery, chaotic beginning, the caterpillar morphs into something beautiful and decent.

It’s an entertaining, interesting book; a window into a unique and unusual life; a journey from chaos to redemption; a where-she-has-been, what-happened-and-what-she’s-like-now story that is witty, thought-provoking, entertaining, and (in the end) quite moving. I definitely recommend it.

Other books I have read that I recommend and which I hope to write about in future issues are “The Baker’s Secret” by Charlotte author Stephen P. Kiernan, “All the Sinners Bleed” by S.A. Cosby and “Twist” by Colum McCann.

Happy spring, and here’s hoping some good reads spring up for you this season!