Frankie’s analysis is a masterclass in literary deconstruction that turns a simple book review into a dense sociological study. While intellectually impressive, it occasionally feels like an academic performance that over-reads the author's intent.
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reading two books with the same coverAdded:
Hello there. Today we're going to read two books that came out recently with very similar covers. Heap Earth Upon It by Khloe Michelle Howorth and A Good Person by Kirsten King. Both have obviously used the same painting with a heavy focus on the modern type face over top. I don't think this is plagiarism. I don't think anyone has called this plagiarism. It's just like an inevitable outcome of the old painting modern font trend in book covers right now. Say what you will, I get it, they're overdone.
I'm not precious about it, but I personally have not grown tired of this trend and I don't think I will. simply because if I see a book with a fun font, especially a brightly colored one, over top of a painting, I know it's probably going to be up my alley. Mildly weird or tense or dark contemporary literary fiction, usually with a woman at the center. I'm thinking of Big Swiss. I'm thinking of all fours. I'm thinking of supper club. I'm thinking of woman eating. I'm thinking of monstrio. You're probably thinking of my year of rest and relaxation, but I'm not because I'm different and I'm better than you.
Anyway, I like the cover of Heat B Earth Upon It better because I like the font more. I love this font. I think it looks so good. I do kind of think that despite having the same painting, these covers are managing to convey something different or like evoke different feelings, particularly with how her face is covered in one and then uncovered in this one. I'm going to stop holding them up and I'm just going to have them on screen because I'm so certain they're not going to be in focus when I hold them up. There's a tenderness and like a softness in her eyes that you don't see in the cover of Heap Earth upon it that gives me a totally different feeling when I look at a good person. And I think that's cool and I wonder if it will be reflected in the stories themselves. What I don't like about this cover, I'm fine with the like hyper saturation. I don't love the bright pink and the bright green together. I think it's kind of heinous. I wish they had just picked one. And I really don't like the spine. I'm not sure if you can see that, but there is an emoji on it. It's like a melting heart eyes emoji. I really, really, really hate that. We're going to start with the cover that I like better. To be perfectly honest with you, I am almost finished with Heaper upon it. We're going to pretend I'm only 100 pages in just for the sake of me not having to sit here and talk for 2 hours straight because I think I would keel over. This is the first book that I got to pick up after finishing finals and I have just been flying through it.
Absolutely unable to put it down and like sit in front of you and talk about it. All I want to do is read this book.
I'm itchy right now. So, safe to say I'm really liking it. Hearth upon it follows a set of orphaned siblings who are mostly in their late 20s as they try to escape their haunted pasts by moving to a new town in rural Ireland where they start getting much too close to their neighbors, an older couple. It's alternating perspectives and it starts with a brother Jack as he and his siblings arrive by cart in this small town. This is set in the '60s which is about as historical as I like to get with my fiction. I feel like before that is when it starts really becoming about the setting and about like pleasing history buffs and showing off your research and how accurate you can get, which is all fine and dandy and it has its place. It's just like that place is not on my shelf. What I care about is the characters. And these characters are fascinating. Jack is very somber, quiet, brooding. He is thoroughly miserable and there's like a melodramatic quality to his voice that just about borders on laughable. It's purposefully a little over the top, a little bit like man who is making himself feel worse just to feel it. And I think it really works for Jack as a character. Jack is grieving in their old home, Kilara. He has left behind a woman that he writes to. Yes, this is second person. Yes, there is a U. My absolute favorite. Nothing conveys yearning like a character who is writing in first person to a U. Jack thinks that he can't believe that a year has passed.
And from that, you're already piecing together that the you he's writing to has probably died and that the siblings are probably escaping something to do with that whole situation. Jack is sitting in the cart sulking while Tom, who if you're like me and you don't remember the summary at the time you're reading this, it is unclear his relation to, sits in the front and drives and tries to introduce himself to every villager that he comes across. Tom is very much the leader. He has this like insecure extraversion where he's just dripping with the need to be liked and is trying way too hard to accomplish it.
And it sort of turns everyone off. It does the opposite, but it also kind of makes them pity him and he breaks them down over time. Though pity is not the outcome that he's looking for. Tom very much wants to be a man with the other men, capital M, men, but he can't get them to treat him like an equal because he doesn't act like an equal. He acts like a pathetic graveling small town politician trying to perform authenticity but being totally transparent to everyone around him. I think I am giving you a skewed first impression of Tom. He isn't this purely hatable [ __ ] He's actually a very sad character in a lot of ways and also he [ __ ] blows in a lot of ways too.
So Tom is leading the carton horse through town trying desperately to catch anyone's eye and it's a very tight-knit small rural town. What he's doing is making a racket that no one is very warm to at this point. And some of the women are kind of nudging each other, talking like they can't hear them about how busy the town is getting. And that's when we first hear from Anna, the last of the elder three oy siblings. She snaps back at the women in a way that Jack is surprised by. Surprised to see her unburdened by expectations and with a little bit of like cheeky humor to her.
We get a far more complete picture of Tom from Jack's perspective here than we do of Anna, which is very deliberate and reflects how Anna is to be treated by her brothers throughout the book. Then Jack pulls the last sibling, Peggy, into his lap. Peggy is 9 years old and she is more of an object to all of the adults in her life than a fully formed human being with thoughts and feelings. Though in different ways, she is an object to each of them. Jack has this like almost absurd bond with her. He loves her very deeply, but in an extreme dependence sort of way. And he talks about her in terms of possession. As the only other sister, Anna has been forced into the role of mother in their mother's absence. And so Peggy is more of a burden to her than anything else, a responsibility unfairly placed on her shoulders. She does love her sister, but that's not enough to not resent her. And then Tom pretty much just resents Peggy, but we will get to that later. As it is now, it seems like Tom is simply happy to sherk the responsibility off onto someone else, onto a woman, so that he can keep doing all of his self-s serving [ __ ] while telling himself it's for the good of the family. But anyway, they get to the cottage where they're staying, and the first thing that Jack notices is that it's all on one level, that there are no stairs or ladder. I think this was hammered home a little bit too hard.
I wish that Howorth had trusted us with just one sentence on this detail, but Jack clings to it. And there are like six sentences about this, though. So, to be fair, this book is written with a lot of very short sentences. That is kind of blowing it a little out of proportion, but like it's really heavy-handed. If you're dropping hints about a mysterious incident that seems to have killed a woman, then I think you should be less in your face about it literally 5 pages in. However, I will say if we never end up getting the details of the past that this family is escaping, then I could be all right with this. Though, I do want to hear the full story, of course. Like, I'm nosy. But I appreciate that the book is giving me enough to piece it together on my own. I just think it should have held back for a little bit longer with this. Like like I'm five pages in now. I know that she obviously was pushed down the stairs by someone. Right. As they settle into this unfernished, rundown house, Jack shuts out the rest of the world and thinks about this woman that he's writing to and kind of like sappily mourns and yearns and wishes she was there and that he had appreciated her more when he had her. It's pretty obvious that his personality has fundamentally changed in the wake of her death. The next perspective we get is Tom. A few days later, he spent the last few days settling into the town by walking around and like shaking everyone's hands and rolling over and showing them his stomach like a dog. And he does end up getting invited to the bar with some local men where he tries his best to get a job by embarrassing himself. They ask him what he did in his old town to be nice and to make conversation and get to know him. And he says he was a turf man. And he can tell by their reactions that the town already has a turf man figured out. And then the conversation moves on, but he interrupts and he goes, "Actually, but I can do all kinds of stuff. like I could do anything. Any job that you might have, I could do it. It's a really good example of how Tom is and how he's perceived.
Everybody knows what he's getting at. He knows that they know what he's getting at, but he still does it anyway. And then he feels this deep embarrassment and shame about it for the rest of his life. Like he will lie awake thinking about this forever. But then that shame doesn't ever change his behavior. He spends the night embarrassing himself in front of all these men who all know each other in this small town with its unknown to him norms and customs. And then he goes home all pissed off about how none of his other siblings are making an effort. They're just staying at home all the time to the point where the people in town are starting to whisper about if they even exist. And then we get a major mic drop here. Tom starts talking to a you as well. And it's the same you as Jack, the presumably now dead woman that they left behind in Kil Mara. Absolutely ridiculously juicy. Oh my [ __ ] god.
We don't really get too much more about the nature of their relationship here, but there's obviously got to be some significance if he is literally addressing her as a U. He runs into a neighbor, Kira, who invites the family over to her house that evening so that the rest of them can introduce themselves to the other people in town.
And Tom is elated, but he doesn't know how he's going to convince his shutin siblings to come along with him. And he knows it would be improper and strange to show up without them. But then he thinks to himself that the truth of it is, if he says they're going, they'll go. He's the head of the household and while his siblings will push back against him, they don't really have any choice. Especially when Tom is the only one making an effort to put food on the table. They are very dependent on him.
At this point, it's still kind of unclear that they're all siblings.
Again, only if you don't remember the summary, which does make it very clear that they are siblings, but it is purposeful, I think, here that it seems for a while that Tom could possibly be the father of this family. We will get to that. And it being unclear also means that we're getting the same perspective of these newcomers as the town's folk are. Tom and Jack both comment on how everyone is probably wondering which of them is married to Anna, whose daughter Peggy is, what's going on with these mysterious people. Tom's chapter ends with him coming home and coming upon a gourd lamb in the road, which makes him think about you and about the horrors of what they left behind in Kilara and how he hopes to one day think about her less and less as he does his dead parents.
Next, of course, we hear from Anna.
While there is definitely a writing style that persists through all of the perspectives, they each have a distinct voice driven by different emotions. And with the exception of Jack, whose like over-the-top mournful sappiness works for his character, none of the voices are blown up so huge that they become grading, which I think is a very difficult feat to achieve. I could flip to any page in here and immediately know what character was speaking, but they're also not too overexaggerated that I get tired of them. Everybody's mourning.
Everybody's yearning for something, but Anna has more rage than anyone else. And Anna is also writing to the same you. Is that not incredible? I'm obsessed. What the hell is going on with this family?
While Jack is moping around the cabin, Anna is sulking and she's sending herself back to memories of you, who, for clarity, I'm just going to tell you now, is named Lillian. Though we don't know that quite yet, we we'll know it very soon. Anna is thinking of Lillian in the bath. There are hints that this is the same you as the boys. She talks about Lillian's sisters and father, which both of the brothers also mentioned, but she also talks about like the soft moss of her body hair and the veins on her chest, which are a little bit gender ambiguous. There's a little manufactured uncertainty here. Maybe Anna has her own you, but she doesn't.
Everyone, everyone, everyone is thinking about Lillian. And Anna is yearning maybe more than anyone else. She's also missing their mother more than anyone else. Missing being told what to do and how to live by another woman specifically. missing just like having a woman in her life, which is maybe what pushes her to agree to go to Kira and John Moore's party that night. Her first real time out of the cabin since they arrived like a week ago. We arrive at the party through Jack's perspective.
And I'm not sure that I can accurately convey the tension here. They have been invited so that the people in the town can sus them out. And there's a lot writing on it. Their livelihood, Tom's ability to get a job, to house and feed them. But even more stressful to me while reading is the social aspect. They could so easily turn into paras here.
It's not a simple job getting acceptance from a town that has established their social lives already. One with far more immigration out than in. And they're already on the brink of being outcasts with Tom's insecure, unlikable ass as their their face and everyone else refusing to engage with anyone at all.
And even knowing these characters for only 30 pages or so, you you still already want them to be less lonely and isolated. So, there's a lot of the social anxiety of doing it all right to performing all of the unwritten expectations flawlessly. Like, they're humiliated to be showing up soaking wet because they only had one umbrella.
They've brought Peggy thinking that there would be other children there, and she's the youngest by over a decade.
Jack and Anna are ashamed to think of how everyone is judging them for having this little girl tag along to an adult party and stay up so late. And watching Tom try to perform affability through Jack's eyes makes it even worse. When they first enter, someone's playing the fiddle and Tom is furiously whispering all of the town's folks names to his siblings and then he gets shushed and Jack thinks that'll surely be added to the list of the great shames of his life. After the fiddler stops, Tom takes them around and talks to anyone who will listen. Bill Nevin comes over and is open and welcoming and friendly, and he takes Peggy outside to meet the new puppies. And Jack thinks about how his small treasure has been stolen away, which is just weird. He's just very weird about her. Again, Peggy has no personhood to him. They also meet the adult daughters of the man who runs the local pub, Mary, who is pregnant as all hell, and Teresa, who Jack shares a little moment of recognition with that he then feels horrible about because he felt a spark. And he doesn't think he should be allowed to move on. They're literally just making eye contact.
That's it. But he keeps coming back to it and then convincing himself it was nothing, that he still loves Lillian.
He's like riddled with guilt, which is compounded by the fact that Tom tells everyone they're from Miltown and neglects to mention anything about Lillian. Though the siblings, which they make clear that they are here finally when talking to the neighbors and deliberately speaking of their shared mother, they had agreed that it was better that no one knew how Lillian died. Jack wasn't expecting her to be completely written out. And he retreats into himself as we switch over to Anna.
Anna is watching Betty Nevin, Bill's husband. I know I'm throwing a lot of names at you right now, but they will click into place. I promise. There really aren't that many characters.
Betty is singing for everyone, and Anna is trying not to let everything around around her remind her of Lillian. Betty does remind her of Lillian, though, but she's also her own thing, and Anna feels really moved by her singing and how she looks with the glow of the fire silhouetting her. The night goes pretty smoothly, though. Anna wants to confront Tom for his lying, not sticking her with the burden of maintaining a lie about where they're from, or even about erasing Lillian. What her problem is is pretending that he was distraught over their mother's death, which he implied was much more recent than it was.
Neither Anna nor Jack felt Tom had a right to claim that grief. There's a hell of a lot going on with this family.
So, it's kind of a breath of fresh air when the next perspective is Betty, the woman that Anna felt some stir in her stomach about when she watched her sing.
Betty is still at Kira's house after the party has cleared, and they're gossiping about this new family in town. While Kira's trying to talk about how they're strange, but like the men were handsome, more than anything, Betty is interested in how beautiful and perfect and underappreciated Peggy was, how unfit her siblings were to care for her. Even when the conversation moves on, Betty's mind stays stuck on how terrible it is for such a lovely child to be motherless. And I really like what's happening here because if you like me pause partway through the first couple chapters to read the back of the book again to figure out what the relationship these people have to each other is, you'll see that it says as one sister grows closer to Betty, lines are crossed. And you have no idea what sister it's going to end up being. Is it Betty's connection to Peggy or Anna's connection to Betty? After this very quick glimpse at what Bettyy's thinking, we're back to the oies. Jack is narrating the tension in the cabin on the morning of their late father's birthday. We get a little lore drop where Tom says 16 years he's been dead in front of Peggy, not caring if Peggy, the 9-year-old, understands what that means. Jack thinks back to when he learned that his mother was pregnant. He was 19 and their dad had been dead for 7 years. No one ever knew who Peggy's father was. And it was this great, horrendous shame over their family. Tom took it the worst. Tom wanted to put their mother into a convent for committing an unforgivable sin. This is not a book that's super explicitly driven by the families or any of the individuals religiosity, but the values are there and it's definitely an inescapable part of this time and place that is incorporated well in my opinion as someone who doesn't really give a [ __ ] about religion. They hid her away in their home and Tom punished her for it for the entire pregnancy. She lived for only 7 hours after Peggy was born.
While Tom stood over her and refused to call for a priest or a doctor. Anna, who was the baby of the family, who had had 17 years of her mother's undivided attention, never forgave Tom and never stopped looking for attention elsewhere.
And Tom never forgave Peggy. Next, we hear from Anna, who has started going into town for walks with Tom, making an effort to open herself up a little more to making a life here. though she feels very alone and out of place and she can't stand how everything always smells like fish. They're always eating fish in this town and it makes her gag. And Tom buys a fish for her to prepare anyway.
And he tells her that they're having Bill and Betty Nevin over for dinner that night. A gathering that he has planned without any heads up and that she alone will have to clean and cook for. And she'll have to cook a fish, something that not only makes her sick, but that she's never in her life prepared before. And then she gets her period. Getting her period makes her think about Lillian. She starts talking to her about how she wanted so badly to know about Lillian's cycle and for them to be synced so that Anna wouldn't have to bleed alone, but that it was always something that Lillian kept to herself, which Anna phrases as another thing you wanted to keep from me to put space between us, which you definitely feel is her assigning malice and feeling jealousy where she probably shouldn't.
These strange and intense feelings about sharing Lillian's menstrual cycle made her feel even worse when she found out that mic drop end of chapter Lillian was pregnant. We move on to Jack. Jack, we just we're just here for a moment to get an outside perspective of how stressed and pissed off Anna is while trying not to blow the [ __ ] up in the house now preparing the fish for this dinner. They all feel very orphaned here. people who haven't had much knowledge passed down to them, who have to figure out a lot of things themselves. And like, you don't just innately know how to cook a fish.
But Hannah Anna has no one to ask. She's just doing her best seething the whole time. She's cramping and sweating, and the house smells like hot fish, and she hasn't had time to change into clean clothes before the Neans are already at her doorstep, coming inside, making themselves at home in a way that's at first unsettling, but then kind of puts her at ease. especially when she realizes that Betty is the woman who sang The Night of the Party. Though, don't get it wrong, Anna is very much still on edge. All these different things are stacking to stress her out and overwhelm her. Her and Tom just about openly bicker when he's asked to do a job fixing a fence for Bill that evening, but they rein it in. Though, Anna still feels like everyone thinks that she's coming across very uptight and controlling because she didn't really have a reason to fight with Tom over going to do the job. I think she just felt a little jealous. There's an awkward silence and Anna takes a bite of the fish to find appallingly it's cold in the center. She just sits there in horror as everyone around her is chatting about neighbors and television which they don't have one of. And then Peggy cuts in and says, "This isn't cooked at all. It's silent for a moment and then Anna blows up. She jumps up from her chair and she shouts at Peggy.
Betty like fully gasps and everyone just sits there and a long moment passes and then she tries to play it off as a joke and everyone knows it wasn't but they let her do it anyway. Betty swoops in with a cake that she's brought and she's like, "Let's just have dessert for dinner tonight instead." She gives Anna a big warm smile, and Anna feels saved.
Betty then invites Anna up to her house with Tom that evening so that while they're fixing the fence, she can show her how to cook a fish. Before we get back to Anna at Betty's place, there's a short chapter of Tom and Bill fixing the fence that really just shows us how Bill is a good guy, and Tom is extremely grateful to be taken under his wing.
Bill says something about how it must be hard for Anna being surrounded by men, which of course he calls lads because it's a very Irish book. And Tom's like, "Well, she's got Peggy." And Bill just gives him a look and says, "A 9-year-old isn't really good company for her, is it?" I don't know if I've said this, but Tom is a big- time misogynist. I feel like it is pretty obvious. I don't know if I have to say it out loud. It's not super in-your-face.
Well, maybe it is. It is very much there. It it like it disturbs him that there's women working at the bar pulling pints and there's like I don't know.
Anna is nothing more than a tool for him. And then of course there's what he did to their mother. At Betty and Bill's place, Anna gags her way through the gutting and preparation of the fish, just desperately wanting it to be over the whole time. But then when it is over, her mind rewrites it, and she immediately starts remembering it with a great fondness. Betty was kind and understanding and gentle with her and it's very obvious at this point that she has fallen in love deeply and far far far too quickly. She would already here follow Betty anywhere. That night, Betty and Bill get ready for bed and they talk about how tense the night was, but how grateful they are that they're able to help this family out. And the conversation turns to how much both of them wish they could do more for Peggy and how terrible they feel for her. And Betty can't sleep as she thinks about this little girl and plans to take her down to see the puppies again the next morning. Then we hear from Jack, who I had expected to be the main character considering that he was introduced first. And he has the most obvious connection to the dead girl that's haunting everyone's pasts and like driving them into this town. But Jack has committed himself to isolation, which he's starting to regret now, seeing how great Tom and Hannah both feel when they get back from the Nevin's place. He's jealous and he's lonely and he's sad and he's kind of fading into the background. He asks Anna if she wants to go for a drink with the Doyle girls, Teresa and Mary, but Anna says, "Absolutely not. You can't go inviting two women out. You're a mad man. Think of how it'll look." And then we switch to Anna, who is more angry at Jack for trying to move on from Lillian than she is about any social transgression that he might have thought of committing.
Anna here is mostly thinking about how she wishes they had been invited to Bill and Betty's place again that it's so embarrassing to sit around all day waiting to hear from them. It's been like a week since their last dinner.
There's a moment where it seems like Anna's you has shifted from Lillian to Betty where she thinks, "If you could just come up the garden path and knock lightly on the door." The next chapter that we're with Anna, it very clearly goes back to being Lillian. But I really like this blurring of lines between her two obsessions. Tom is also waiting around to hear from Bill. And then he finally does. Bill asks him for help three days in a row. And on the fourth day, he doesn't wait to be asked. He's got a job working on the farm. eternally grateful to Bill for the opportunity and the kindness. And Bill hiring Tom gives Anna an excuse to go down to their place every night under the pretense of picking up Tom to walk him home, but really to be invited in to spend time in Betty's kitchen with her. They become pretty fast friends. It's not one-sided, but it is very unbalanced with Betty being seemingly genuinely warm to Anna, but Anna being like totally unequivocally devoted to Betty. And god, do I love a story of a [ __ ] up, isolated character who is only saved by a single connection to another person that drives both of them insane. It is so perfectly tense. You want Anna to stay in Betty's good graces, but she is so desperate for it. Her behavior gets more and more unhinged, and you know it's all going to fall apart, and it's so frightening, not knowing exactly how horribly Anna is going to take it, especially because of how many hints have been dropped that Anna pushed Lillian down the stairs, but even just the intensity of her emotions and how volatile she is moving between emotions shows you that she might be capable of something scary if this goes wrong. So, even in the good part, in the calm before the storm, where Anna is happy and calm and settled and saved, that's the word she keeps using, saved, you're still on the edge of your seat. When is she going to let her true feelings shine through? When is it going to cross the line? Even an innocuous conversation can be filled with an underlying dread. And I love it. I adore it. It's It's incredible to me. I also am really interested in a dynamic where a narrator is so devoted to this person who has no idea. And so they have no idea the amount of power that they hold.
Everything revolves around what Betty does. Even her having an off day and being a little short with Anna or a little tired could send Anna absolutely spiraling. Anyway, where we'll end off here is with the two of them talking casually in Betty's kitchen while they wait for the men. Anna is thinking the whole time that she would do anything for Betty, that she's desperate to move into their spare bedroom, that no one has ever made her feel like this before, except maybe a friend that she had dreamed of going to America with before the friend married the milkman, or maybe her brother's now dead pregnant fiance, or maybe a different friend that she had, or a different one. But no, none of them are quite like Betty, because unlike those other women, Betty would never leave her. And then at the end of the chapter, Betty asks Anna to ask Peggy if she would come down the next day after school to make some Bridges crosses, which I think is an Irish Christian thing. It's like a cross woven from straw that they give out to the older neighbors. And Anna is thinking about what an angel Betty is to take the burden of Peggy off of her shoulders.
But we all know that Betty really wants Peggy as her own daughter. And it's starting to look like she might have ulterior motives inviting Anna around so much. That is about 100 pages into the book. There's 300 pages, so I will update you in another 100 pages. I have been loving it. I really hope I've managed to convey the tension here because retelling it, I think it seems more character heavy than it really is.
The plot is there and it absolutely pushes you through, but it is definitely mostly focused on the characters. And I've just been flying through it so much so that I really haven't been taking good notes. And going back over it now, I have noticed that I don't appreciate the writing as much the second time. I think the momentum is really helping to carry me through the story, even when the writing isn't necessarily like incredible blowing me off my feet.
Though, on the whole, I do think it's very well written. It's just even better paced than it is written. It took me a few chapters to get into it, and there are some things I don't like, but more than anything, I'm just really excited to keep reading it. I will see you in 100 pages, which I'm like basically almost at. Okay, bye. All right, 100 pages further into Heap Earth upon it, and it's getting juicier. Let's talk. We left off with Anna head over heels for Betty. The next chapter has Jack finally pulling himself out of the house, going down to the pub to meet with Tom, who is super late to meet with him. Tom's lateness gives Jack a chance to eye up Teresa again. She offers him a cigarette, and he hates rejecting her, but he gave up cigarettes for Lillian, which he says is his biggest regret.
Not, as you might expect, telling Anna about the pregnancy. When Tom finally shows up for a drink with some men from the town, Jack is really stuck in his head thinking about Lillian while the small talk around him occasionally cuts in. He's thinking about how the pregnancy was good news. Just because they did things slightly out of order didn't mean that she deserved what happened to her, which I think is pointing a finger in Tom's direction. It really leans heavily on this pregnancy before marriage thing. And we know what Tom did to the other woman in his life who had a baby outside of wedlock. It could go either way, I think, who pushed Lillian. The book really, really wants you to believe that it was Anna. I did assume from chapter 2, first being introduced to Tom, that it was some sort of like scorned lover situation, but Tom really didn't actually love Lillian, and it does not seem like they were having an affair. If that ends up being true, I'm going to be pissed. That'll come out of nowhere. Tom just wanted what Jack had. But literally everything since that point up until now has made it seem like it was really Anna who did it. telling Anna should have been my biggest regret though could mean that Anna is the one who told Tom. I don't know. I feel like there is some ambiguity here. Like we've learned a lot about is what about what is meant to be their mysterious past, but there has to be some little mystery to to keep us hanging on to those threads that they are so stuck on. It's leading us by the hand to a certain conclusion, but it's also dropping breadcrumbs of an alternate one. Next up, we see Betty and Peggy making bridges crosses together and chatting.
And Peggy brings up Lillian and tells Betty that she was Jack's girl. And Betty is too curious and eager for more information, which causes Peggy to shut down until the conversation moves on.
Betty can definitely sense that there's something up there, but she doesn't push too hard. She's certainly not thinking that like a murder was covered up or anything like that, just that there was some messy breakup or something of the sort that she's that she's curious about. The two of them have a lovely afternoon and Betty is thinking that she needs to keep Anna happy so that she can keep looking after Peggy without crossing any lines. She's trying to balance her obsession with what's socially acceptable. We get some chapters of Tom and Jack doing Tom and Jack things. Jack is figuring out how he feels about Teresa and about moving on and Tom is following Bill around like a puppy genuinely like worshiping the ground that he walks on. While nothing new or of note happens for them, the chapters are a perfect length to never make it feel unnecessary. I think their idiosyncrasies and development is being built up just enough without it getting too repetitive. Anna takes Peggy to the farmers market just so she has the opportunity to follow Betty around and see what things she buys and who she talks to. They of course run into each other and Anna feels a little bit caught out, but then Betty asks if she could take Peggy to help with some chores and see Kira's puppies. And Anna says, "Absolutely, we'll all go." Which literally no one but Anna wants. And they are not subtle about not wanting her. Peggy and Betty walk hand in hand in front of her, talking to each other with great familiarity. And Anna is wounded and extremely jealous, but also kind of just relieved to be in Betty's company. Back at Betty's place, when Anna is left alone with the laundry, feeling like she's come last again, and that her friendship with Betty is slipping out of her fingers, she takes Betty's blue headscarf and tries it on before shoving it in her purse. And she also picks up a few pieces of Betty's hair off of one of her dresses and braids them into her own hair, which is awesome. Love that. Then it switches to Betty, who has picked up on Anna's jealousy, especially when Anna starts crying and asking her who her best friend in town is like a child would.
But then when the two women have a moment alone, Anna says something about how nice it is to be around a woman and not have to translate herself like she has to do with her brothers. And though Betty can't empathize because Bill is awesome, it does melt her a little bit.
She warms up to to Anna again. Though, as soon as Anna isn't actively in her face, it's only Peggy that occupies Betty's thoughts, which Anna notices.
So, to keep her attention, to keep her interested, she says Jack was almost a father back in Kil Mara, which is not totally out of the blue. They were talking about having children and how Betty always wanted some, but it never worked out. Betty's eyes widen at this, but before she can respond, Bill and Tom show up. And when Anna and Peggy and Tom leave for the evening, she's like staring yearningly over her shoulder at Betty, and she hears Betty asking Bill if he's ever heard of a place called Kilara. I didn't notice it until then.
Anna said, "Kilara, and they're meant to be from Miltown." It is all starting to crumble. With Jack, he's still really struggling with his own thoughts and feelings about moving on and his isolation now that his siblings spend a lot of time out of the house. So, he's looking for a guilt-free distraction, and he asks Tom if he could come down and work at Bills together. Tom and Jack have a very competitive relationship that's mostly just competitive from Tom's side. Jack, as the younger, but more well-liked brother, denied Tom the manhood he felt he was owed by being the oldest. Before What Happened to Lillian, Jack was a really outgoing, likable guy.
He had tons of friends. He found it very easy to socialize. And he was also their father's pick for most capable son. Jack would get to work with their dad on the farm while Tom would have to clear the field of rocks and do menial [ __ ] like that. And now that Jack is a shell of himself, Tom is taking a lot of pride in being the more outgoing and accepted brother. Jack doesn't really give a [ __ ] He does sometimes want his brother to feel that he could take everything away again and be the better brother again. Like they'll be at the pub and just for a minute he'll easily casually say something to get positive attention from Bill just to watch Tom squirm. So when Jack asks if he can tag along, Tom revels in the power. And he says no. He says it wouldn't be good for you. It's a lot of work with cows and bulls. You couldn't handle it. And Jack can't really argue with that. So he's once again left alone. But he's pissed that Tom has made it about the cows. He tells us pretty quickly, like basically instantly that this is because it's how their dad died. He died on the farm gored by a bull right in front of Jack who couldn't save him. And Jack was the one who was there because he was always the one who got to work with their dad.
Jack pulls himself out of this memory by going down to the pub where he runs into Tom and Bill. Bill who who is on the phone having a meeting and Teresa is there and Jack is feeling sensitive from the conversation earlier and a little combative. And he pokes fun at Tom and brings him down a peg, calling him a little boy for following Bill to the pub. And this also works to get a laugh out of Teresa who has started asking her dad to let Jack work at the pub with no luck so far. Back with Anna and Betty, they see each other and the next time they see each other, Anna is filled with jealousy over everything Betty says.
Every person that also gets to know Betty, every story that she tells, every memory that Anna isn't a part of enrages her. But then Betty brings her back by asking if she's planning to go to the dance next weekend, which she isn't delusional enough to think is an invitation to go together, but does make her feel wanted, and she's delusional enough to start daydreaming about finding Betty on the dance floor and having a moment with her. The evening that Betty and Anna are talking about the dance, Tom and Bill finish up work and then the four of them have a couple of drinks in the kitchen and they get a little bit riled up and then a neighbor appears at the door and Bill gets up and motions for Tom to follow him. And then there's a series of very short chapters going back and forth between Tom and Anna. So Tom is led by Bill in helping with the birth of a calf in this scene where we kind of contend with Tom's relationship to pregnancy and motherhood a little. He says there that he expects he expects this pregnancy, this birth to be a grand panicked thing, but the cow really doesn't need all that much help.
And then when she does need help, he gives it to her. Not for her really, but more to prove to Bill that he is a man to emulate Bill. Tom and Bill are like the epitome of do I want him or do I just want to be him? And there's of course something very significant in the fact that when things get difficult with the birth, he works to write them. But when it was his own mother, he chose to watch her die. Anna, on the other hand, is getting a little too sloppy in Betty's kitchen. It's moving very deafly between the two characters. Anna definitely has the more tense part here because she's just a really intense person, but then being with Tom in this moment with the cow stuff kind of makes you feel gross. So, it's like a little bit sickening and a little bit dizzying.
Anna ends up dropping her glass on the floor. She's not sure if it was by accident or to get attention. She falls to her knees and she starts picking up the pieces of glass all while whimpering desperate apologies. And of course, she cuts her hands on the glass. And Betty hasn't really noticed, which makes Anna think, "Maybe we've had too much to drink." And then she thinks, "Yes, we've definitely had too much to drink because if we hadn't, Betty would not be taking my hand in hers and then sucking the blood off of my fingers." I shrieked.
That's an exaggeration. I gasped. I My hand flew over my mouth. Anna then wonders what kinds of other terrible things she can do to get Betty to pay attention to her like this. And then we go to the next morning from Betty's perspective where of course like of course she like how like how could you ever think it was anything else? She starts thinking about that weird awkward night last night where Anna cut her fingers and then sucked on her own fingers and just stared up at Betty like a a weird little kid. This has not totally come out of nowhere. Anna has not had a consistent or strong grasp on reality through the story. This is definitely the farthest that that has ever gone. Usually, she just has conversations with her dead mother that make Jack so violently angry he needs to leave the house before he actually hurts her. When he talks about these episodes, he says that she leaves long pauses like she's waiting for her mom's response.
But it hasn't been clear if this is just like a troubling coping mechanism or something more. Now though, it's starting to seem like she is sometimes living in a different reality. Up until this point in the book, I had kind of been wishing that we didn't get any of Betty's perspective. A lot of what we hear from her could have been left for us to interpret through other characters perspectives. And I do really wish we had been more in Anna's shoes, like wondering and guessing at how Betty feels about her and if she's freaking her out and also like questioning her attachment to Peggy and thinking about if that's the only reason that she's being kind to Anna. It's a It's a little It weakens it a little bit to hear it directly from her. And I think having her perspective cut would have strengthened a lot of the first part of the book and brought me in closer to the other characters' lives and their dynamics. I feel like I would I would feel more implicated just by needing to think more and to interpret what's going on in her head. But at the same time, I do think that if this over halfway through the book was the first time that we ever heard from Betty's point of view, this moment would have been a bigger mic drop than what it seems like Howorth wanted it to be. But I also feel like she's a good enough writer that she could have made it work. From here though, we do need Betty in her perspective ad stuff that we wouldn't have been able to get from the outside.
Because not only does she reveal that Anna was sucking her own fingers, she also looks inside the purse that Anna had left at her place the night before.
And she finds a mask card for Lillian.
Whatever that is, it doesn't matter. It has her name and her date of death on it. So now Betty knows that Lillian has died, which freaks her out and only makes her more freaked out when she finds the second thing in the purse, her missing blue headscarf. Czechov's [ __ ] headscarf. Of course, it was going to come back. Betty starts freaking out, in my opinion, a little bit too much. She's like, I can't tell Bill cuz he's going to go confront Tom and Anna and he'll overreact and cause a scene. But like, I kind of don't think that Bill would give a [ __ ] Like, I don't know. I can see this as just like Betty's headsp space that Anna's increasingly unhinged behavior has worked her up into, but I still thought it didn't really quite fit with her or her husband. Before she has to decide what to do, her friend Kira shows up dragging her husband along because he's pissing her off and she wants to dump him on Bill. They get to dish about what the hell is going on with the Oiris, which Kira is happy to do cuz she she always thought that they were weird as hell. The two of them make a plan to get Anna off of Betty's back by introducing her to a local bachelor at the upcoming dance. And Betty thinks about how she gets the sense that Anna is the kind of woman who's proud to have never been touched by a man. And I like that because it isn't true at all. And Anna has actually talked in her narration about the few times that she's been with, I think, exclusively married men just just to do it, just because she wanted to do it. I love when characters are wrong about each other. I love when they don't know everything we know and the author isn't afraid of those people who are reading the book looking for plot holes where there aren't any. I love when characters have a subjective and flawed view of the world and when you're pulled out of believing that everything they think must be the truth simply because they're your eyes into their world. It's awesome. I love an unreliable narrator and I love a confidently wrong narrator. So all three of the older siblings go to the dance.
Tom for the love for the love of the game, for the love of the town, Jack for the love of Teresa, and Anna for the love of Betty. It flicks really quickly between the three of them. There's like these short half-page chapters before it finally settles on a longer chapter with Anna, who is of course trying to find Betty the entire night, catching glimpses of her while she's spun around on the dance floor. When she finally does find her, Betty greets her with a huge smile and then essentially pushes this eligible bachelor into her arms and walks the other way. Anna is heartbroken and also offended. She had built up this night in her head. She had imagined doing away with social pressures and dancing with Betty no matter what anyone else thought. And now she's watching the back of her head disappear out the door while she's stuck with a man who isn't even that attractive. Like, this is who Betty thinks she deserves. Anna pushes the dude off of her so hard that she actually crashes into an extremely pregnant Mary Doyle, Teresa's sister, and she gets a whole bunch of rightfully angry looks. And then she follows Betty outside where Betty looks almost frightened to see her and she puts distance between them and Anna is like a little bit too out of it from the dancing and all the emotions and you can like feel the suffocation of the dance floor and then the stark difference with the quiet and fresh cold air of night as they stand outside here facing each other. All Betty says is, "I just needed a break." And Anna thinks I'm included in the crowd of people that she needed a break from. So Anna says, "You're fine."
And it comes out like she is disgusted with Betty, which she can hear in her own tone, but she can't back down from, especially when she doesn't get any reaction at all. No reaction has her desperate, like she's begging Betty to go back inside with her. And when that doesn't work, she snaps and she shouts her name. And Betty doesn't flinch, but narrows her eyes and asks Anna if she's been drinking. And Anna can feel all of the warmth that was between them has gone. And she's spiraling and grasping for something to hold on to. She wants to bring Betty back to her, but all she can do in this moment is be mean. And she's not all that good at being mean.
She acts like a child. She starts calling Betty names, but she says like, "You're weak." And like, "Why are you being so boring?" And then before anything more can happen as she's just like pushing Betty further and further away beyond recovery, Kira comes out and can tell something is going on and asks if everything is all right and ushers Betty away. And as Betty passes Anna, she puts her hand on her arm and says, "Smarten up, girl." And Anna knows on some level that it's over, but she is way beyond giving up and mourning the friendship that they had. And who [ __ ] knows what direction she's going to take this trying to claw her way back. I kind of love that this explosion that we've been waiting for where Betty gets fed up with or too scared of Anna has come so quietly. It's not really anticlimactic, though. It it could feel that way to some people. I think it didn't matter how this went down. I'm still scared of what Anna is capable of and what her brain is going to tell her to do and how untethered from reality she's going to get after her and Betty completely fall apart. I like that this is kind of like more realistic. It's just really two women having a bit of a tiff and it's not even a tiff. Like it's mostly just Anna acting like a child saying [ __ ] like, "Why are you being so boring?" They exchange very few sentences in this altercation, but their relationship was not developed enough to really survive it, especially if Anna doesn't change, which I think we have seen she's not really capable of at this point. So, yeah, that's about 200 pages in. I think this is definitely where it's going to start picking up and I'm really excited to see where it's going.
Not that it has been slow. I think the pacing has been incredible, at least to me, at least in the context I'm in in my life right now where I finally get to read and I'm not in school anymore. I do hope that there's some kind of explosive ending and that it doesn't drop the ball and fizzle out, but I feel like it has set itself up to follow the typical trajectory of an obsession story like this and it's not going to fail to do something. I really do believe that. I would love it if it were to do something new and fresh and exciting, but I don't think that I necessarily need that from this book. I think it stands out enough on its own with the unique setting. I will see you at the end 100 pages from now. It's looking like a high four.
Hopefully, it maintains that. All right, I have finished Heat Earth Birth Upon It, and I'm ready to talk about it. I left you off with a bit of a cliffhanger with Anna, not necessarily digging herself a hole, but more of a grave in regards to her relationship with Betty.
Bill and Betty leave the dance pretty much right away, and she says something to him about how intense the olderies are, and he's like, "Huh, interesting. I never noticed." And so she convinces herself, not that Anna isn't strange, but that she isn't scared of Anna, though it's so clear that she is. At the pub the next day, she's talking to Kira about the whole mess and how she couldn't sleep the night before and how guilty she feels about not getting along with Anna because she wants to get along with everyone, but she's trying to tell herself that she doesn't need to be friends with everyone. And then she remembers Peggy and she realizes how devastated she would be if she couldn't spend time with Peggy anymore. And she knows that she would put up with Anna if it meant that she got to keep Peggy around. Then Kira suggests something that makes Betty burn her tongue on her coffee, that maybe Anna is attracted to her. She scandalously whispers that you hear about that happening sometimes. And then who appears in the club but Anna herself. She's there for the book club that the women in town have run by Betty. Betty has been inviting Anna to it since they first met. It switches to Anna's perspective and Anna says that she sits down next to Betty and Kira has to move to make room for her, which is maybe the most awkward thing I've ever heard in my entire life. Like that could be the moment in the book that got the most visceral reaction out of me. Betty and Kira are trying to hide their surprise and discomfort and Anna of course refuses to pick up on it. But as the reader, even through Anna's willfully ignorant perspective, you know that it's there. Kira excuses herself to the bathroom and Betty has a talk with Anna. She tells Anna that she thinks it's time she made some other friends and give Betty a little bit of space.
And you can imagine how well that goes over. But in public in the light of day, Anna doesn't lash out like she did the night before. Her first instinct is to be angry at Betty, but then she starts directing that anger inward, searching herself for the reasons why Betty doesn't like her as much as she did at the start. Betty and Kira had actually totally forgot about the book club until other people start filing in. And the whole time the book club is going on, Anna is just thinking, "I could be yours forever, endlessly over and over and over again. By the time they wrap it up, she has protected herself by convincing herself that Betty would only be so open and vulnerable to tell her that she needs to change if she really cared about Anna. that none of her other intense friendships in the past have had this level of communication and that must mean something. But Anna can't commit to changing for very long. As soon as the meeting is over and everyone heads home for the night, Anna is unmed until she decides to follow Betty home.
It's not even really an active decision on her part. It's more just where her feet inevitably take her. When she gets there, she can see Bill and Betty inside having an intimate moment, kissing each other in the kitchen, and she's like, "I cannot believe that Betty would do this in front of me." It disgusts her to see them entangled like this, to be unable to write off Bill's significance as Betty's husband. So, she stomps over to the back door despite the late hour and she knocks on it hard and Bill comes to the door and he tells her that Betty isn't home yet and he shuts the door in her face. Anna is in shock and she pulls out a matchbook from her pocket. It's raining though, like this is never going to go anywhere. She's not going to be able to light the house on fire, but she does have all the intentions of doing it. She thinks that she could burn this place down and Bill would die inside and Betty could come stay with her while they rebuilt. And she thinks about how Betty would be indebted to her because Anna wouldn't mind the smell of burning skin and hair. But then she feels Lillian's presence and it compels her to walk away. For a few days after this, Jack is still discovering his relationship with Teresa. Anna is getting sucked into her own little world, constantly wondering what she's done wrong and how to win Betty back.
while Tom is planning his 30th birthday party that of course Anna has to single-handedly throw. At this point in the novel, there's a lot on Anna's shoulders, and I kind of wish that we were seeing an even greater amped up tension of the overwhelming domestic tasks that she's burdened with, like we saw when she was trying to cook the fish for the first time. But I do think here she's kind of too far outside of reality to really be affected by this stuff in the same way. Jack is spending all of his time at the pub chasing down Terresa Doyle and his totally abandoned Peggy who for so long he clung to with an uncomfortable desperation for like love and affection. I don't want to imply that something more was going on with his connection to her because it definitely wasn't inappropriate in that way, but it was inappropriate and it's very telling how easily he can throw away his little sister for another woman who can give him more of what he wants.
It's just more of the use of women as tools and objects that maintain a man's lifestyle and emotional stability that we see in many ways in this book. When the party comes, Jack does notice how strange it is that Betty sits Peggy on her lap and starts brushing her hair just like in the middle of everyone.
Because that is one thing that we can't forget about Betty in the midst of all Anna's weirdness. She's weird as [ __ ] too. Usually, she's a little bit better at mitigating how weird she is and staying within the confines of social convention, but not always. And even Jack, in the presence of Teresa, mind you, is noticing. But then, of course, he does go back to Teresa, who he's starting to accept he's going to need to tell about Lillian if he really wants to move on with her and make it work.
They're kind of wrapped up with each other, and then it switches to Anna, who is just about to come over and smack him upside the head for holding hands with her in front of everyone, but they pull away just in time. She's thinking that he's doing all this just to get on her nerves, to push it as far as he can before she reacts. But he's really not thinking about Anna at all. He never thinks about Anna. She is a ghost that does his laundry and cooks him dinner.
At this point, Anna is offended at his public display of affection with Teresa, which again was just holding hands. It's more so because she wants him to be mourning Lillian with a veil over his face for the rest of his life, though.
Thinking of Lillian does make her think of that final night, and she starts to cry. So, she locks herself away in the bedroom, where Betty comes to find her and ask her what's wrong and offers to make her a hot whiskey. But it is not long before Anna snaps out of it and realizes that Betty is not there in the room with her and never was. This is not like a oo it was all a dream or hallucination moment. You never really thought that Betty was in the room with her. I mean like as if Betty would ever walk away from Peggy, right? Tom in his world has been asked to go outside by a solemnl looking Bill Nevin who is offering him work in the Big Apple with Betty's brother's company. Betty talks sometimes about how many decades it's been since she's last seen her brothers.
Immigration for work is a really large part part of like the culture in this town. Everyone has lost someone who is still alive. Everyone feels a little bit left behind here. And Tom wants to take this offer. Tom wants to do what Bill thinks is best for him, but he can't. He knows that he can't leave his siblings.
Part of his reasoning is actually that without him, the most hands-off pseudo parent to ever [ __ ] live, Peggy wouldn't stand a chance, and it would be a waste for her to amount to nothing after all of the damage that she's caused simply by being born. Bill won't really take no for an answer. He at least wants Tom to think on it for longer. He calls Tom Thomas, and he's like, "Oh my god, when he calls me Thomas," and then a second later, he thinks, "I wish there was a woman here so that I could have a hug." like you're in love with him. Come on. He's so delusional and he's stuck so far in the delusion that you know he's never going to face it head on. Not in his lifetime.
At one point in the night as Anna is sitting there seething and moping about how everyone is having a better time than she is and that all she wants to do is be in Betty's arms, which shouldn't be too much to ask, Peggy comes up to her and is crying. And she assumes correctly Peggy is crying over Jack and Teresa. Of course, though, she doesn't comfort Peggy. She gets herself upset and leaves the child crying in the middle of the party and runs out into the night. We then cut to Jack who has not succeeded in opening up to Teresa and is lying in bed except not in bed because Tom never bought them beds like he promised to in the beginning. It's still the night of the party and he is thinking about it after waking up from a dream. And then he looks over at Anna and he can tell that she is awake and she smells like she's been outside. The next day at Bill and Betty's house, there's a knock at the door and Betty just knows it'll be Anna and she braces herself to open it. But then it's Peggy all alone on the doorstep and wound very tightly. Betty can tell it takes a lot of time to get her to say anything at all and even then more time to coax out of her what she wants to say, which is that Jack and Teresa at the party upset her and made her think of Lillian. And then she drops the bombshell that she was awake the night that Lillian died and she saw it all. And right as soon as she says that, Bill bursts through the door, which is a little bit eye roll inducing. Like, come on. Like, come on.
the the book is not doing the best job at balancing keeping a mysterious secret and also doling out the information. Are you like, are you serious? Bill walks in. Whatever. He can sense that something is going on and Betty takes him into the kitchen and finally gives him a very quick rundown of everything that's happened. And then she tells him to call Tom or Jack and tell them that Peggy is staying there tonight cuz they don't want her out in the bad weather.
And Bill pretty sternly says she's not ours to keep. But Betty thinks, "Well, she's mine for the moment." We then cut to Jack in the pub having a drink with Teresa and finally painfully telling her about the woman that he left behind, how she died, how it was covered up to look like an accident, and how it was Anna who pushed her down the stairs, which at this point we do know. The police had ruled it an accident, but the coroner thought that it was foul play, and Tom had wanted to skip town in case any more investigation was done. While we don't get like a comprehensive narration of Teresa's reaction because Jack is definitely more concerned with how this hasn't really felt like the weight lifting that he was expecting it to, she does take it pretty well, very empathetically, very concerned about how he feels and of course very shocked to hear this all. He has said that he knows Teresa wants a man with a dark soul and what's darker than a dead fiance killed and covered up by a codependent set of siblings. Right. The next morning, Bill drops Peggy off with Tom, who can see that he doesn't want to let her go and that she doesn't want to leave him. And Tom's first thought is, "Wow, I have something that Bill wants." Exactly like that. I have something. The living, breathing human that Peggy is. After a day of work where Bill has kind of made himself scarce and ask that they don't talk about the New York offer, Tom pops into the Nevin's house to check in on Betty. And she like really pushes him out the door with an unprecedented urgency. When he comes in, she's sitting at the table staring off into nothing.
And then she like gives him a loaf of bread and like ushers him out. Of course, Anna takes this loaf of bread as an olive branch and is certain that the two of them are migrating back to each other, that this bread was meant for her. She even asks Tom if Betty asked about her, and of course, the answer is no. Tom actually does know that Betty doesn't like Anna. He asked Bill about it outright, but he does not tell her that. So, she gets to work making Betty a cake, which Tom takes to her the next morning with a lot of hesitation that Anna does not interrogate. By that evening, Anna has to go back to their place just to see Betty. She stands by the bedroom window and watches her sleeping. And then she lets herself into the kitchen, and she's overcome with relief and contentment and calm. And then it's all ripped away when she sees the cake thrown into a bucket of chicken feed. She stays in the kitchen stewing for a long while and then leaves before Betty and Bill can wake up, spending the morning hiding in the bushes, watching the house from afar so she can pounce once Bill and Tom are at work in the field and Betty is alone. She comes to the door. She tells Betty, who is blocking off the doorway with her body, not giving Anna an inch, that she just wants to talk. From Betty's perspective, she sees a woman barefoot in February looking like she spent the night outside and the last few hours in a bush. But Anna can get Betty's undivided attention by telling her about Lillian, saying that she had blocked it out, but that last night she remembered what really happened. She could never really accept the version of events that Tom told her.
She loved Lillian and she didn't think that she would kill her. She tells Betty, "I loved Lillian the same way I love you, and that's the only thing I'm certain of right now." And then she moves forward and she kisses Betty's cheek and her jaw and her tight unmoving lips as Betty stands stalk still and a tear slides down her cheek which Anna laps up. And then Anna runs far enough to hide and again watch from the bushes.
And she can hear Betty shrieking her name and running to find Bill. In Anna's mind, rejoicing. Anna's behaviors have turned both Bill and Betty sour on Tom as well. Tom, who is watching Betty tell her husband about what's happened, crying in his arms. And Tom is wishing that he could throw Betty aside and be the one to cry in Bill's arms. Betty turns and outright asks him if he killed Lillian. And he says, "No, it was Anna."
And then he's like, "Oh, [ __ ] I was supposed to say it was an accident." Tom goes home for the night and he tries to confront Anna, but she just spews nastiness at him. She hits him right where it hurts and tells him that Bill doesn't love him, that he's only Bill's employee. And then she gets back to her sewing while Tom blubers his prayers.
That night, of course, Anna goes back down to the Nevin's place. She knows that Tom is coming up with some kind of plan to deal with her, but she knows him well enough to know that he has to think it all through before he really carries it out. That is not a quality that Anna has. So, she's down at the Nevin's place and she is watching Betty sleeping once again from outside the window until Betty opens her eyes and Anna can see her say, "She's outside, Bill." And so, Anna runs. After a while, the sun starts to come up and she can see Tom running at her in the distance and it all rushes back. How Tom reacted when she told him that Lillian was pregnant, how easily he sent her flying down the stairs, how Anna was too late to stop it. Tom catches up to her and she thinks to herself, "Don't forget me, darling, and then he kills her offcreen." It's not necessarily ambiguous, but it's also not explicit, and I do like that. But once again, I think it could have been left a little bit more for me to interpret.
Like a lot of things that this book wants you to pick up on, it says exactly the right amount and then it says like three more sentences that make you feel like you weren't trusted enough to get it the first time. It's not as egregious as a lot of handholdy books that I've read, but it's definitely an area that could have improved my experience reading this a lot. Jack's final chapter ends with him mulling over what Tom did and how he had always wanted to kill Anna after what she did to Lillian, but didn't want another source of grief in their lives. He's accepting what it means for who he is as a person that he let Tom do this and that he feels relieved in her absence. And he thinks that were he and Lillian to meet again, she would never love this new version of him like she did the first one. And he lets her go. Tom's final chapter has him talking to Bill and telling him that he took Anna to the convent. And Bill tells him that he did the right thing, which Tom repeats over and over and over again. And then the last chapter of the book is with Betty a few months later where we learn that Tom had accepted the offer to go to New York, that Jack and Teresa have gotten together and moved to a new town and they visit just on weekends. And Peggy now lives with Bill and Betty, pretty properly abandoned by her brothers. Tom doesn't even call. And when Jack comes back to visit, he keeps himself so far removed that they seem more like distant cousins. And Betty isn't necessarily all that pleased either. She says, "I suppose I got what I wanted." That is the very bleak ending to Heap Earth upon it by Khloe Michelle Howorth. I can understand both hating and liking this ending. I think it is pretty terrible to watch a woman who has been used and discarded by the men in her life die at the hands of the worst offender of her misogynistic treatment.
But there's also a sense that this is the only way that it will end. Not that Anna is incapable of change, but that she's surrounded by people incapable of caring enough about her to support her in changing. So Anna has to die and then she dies and everything still kind of [ __ ] sucks. I don't hate that, but I can see why some people might hate that.
I do think it's kind of crazy that Tom elected to leave Bill behind in Ireland.
Like come on, he was in love with the man. But at the same time, I can see that he was doing what he knew Bill wanted and being the man that Bill was teaching him to be. I think I just wish that he had had even a passing thought about never seeing Bill again. This book didn't blow me away with how it ended, but it also didn't drop the ball doing what it set out to do. I am perfectly satisfied with what it was. I also know at the same time that there is a version of this book that went off the [ __ ] walls and took risks and did something crazy, and that is the version that I would be gushing about right now. The potential is there, but I I also don't feel like it didn't live up to its potential. It did what it needed to do, and I enjoyed reading it. To me, it was just like a solid good four-st star read. If you're feeling oversaturated with this kind of weird girl obsessive fiction that publishing obviously loves right now, I don't think that this is the book for you, I don't think it's doing anything super unique or shocking.
And if you like this kind of book, I have to assume that's part of what you're looking for. A very similar book that executes the shock better that I would recommend is Where I End by Sophie White. Both books have a similar atmosphere and style of pros, but Where I End had me stressed the [ __ ] out. Both books are filled to the brim with yearning. This one more so, I think, than Where I End. I haven't read Sunburn, her debut, but I am interested in reading it now. And from what I've heard, the yearning seems to be Howard's emmo, and she's pretty damn good at it.
Particularly with like the gay women stuff, but literally every character in here is so filled with want in so many different ways, and it all feels very real. Tom and Jack's characters are quite repetitive with it at certain parts, Jack especially. So, but Howard managed to never make that boring for me when it easily could have been. It felt like the cyclical thinking of someone caught in a spiral of grief trying to learn how to move on. Like, yes, there were many times where I summarized a Jack's chapter by saying, "Jack is doing what Jack is always doing." But in the act of reading the book, that only built on his character. He never felt completely stuck or unchangeable. I thought that the gender politics of the time were touched on the perfect amount.
Howorth didn't take over with her 2026 voice and write about the 60s in rural Ireland in a ridiculous implausible way.
And she also didn't dumb it down as if women 60 years ago were only just starting to learn that they too are people. With womanhood in this book, it was more focused on how sexism and oppression manifested in interpersonal relationships and character motivations, which I think is an endless well of discovery for topics that can sometimes feel like they have been written to death. It avoids making the reader feel like they're being preached at or spoken down to. And it also avoids what I think often happens where a writer has to water down their, for example, feminism.
And then the audience feels like we're taking a gender studies 101 class when we're like 10 years out from graduating the program. I especially think that this focus works for historical fiction like this. I would say this book is more set in the '60s than it is historical fiction, if that makes sense. Because more than anything, it is just so character focused. That doesn't mean that the characters are immune to the impacts of history or their context. I es especially liked the implicit religiosity in this book. The church and God are so intricately tied into the lives of these characters that it is just normal. They don't spend much time at all ruminating on it, though. They're often praying or going to mass or whatever it is Catholics do. I'm pretty sure they're Catholics. I'm so sorry if they're not. But their narration has this religious quality to it. Even the way everyone speaks to a U and how characters become stand-ins for God for other characters. I noticed a lot of phrasing that would say that would start with like let this be like let this be my last breath is one I think comes up.
But it it does come up a few times and I think it's cool how you can see their upbringing seep into the way that they think. Generally I was a fan of the writing, but it did take a moment to grow on me. It was a relief to see that not everyone talks the way that Jack does in his first chapter because my god is he mopey and dramatic and it's very overly emotionally driven writing, but even that ended up working. There were some small quirks that bothered me that are so meaningless and nitpicky, but that I could not help but keep noticing.
In particular, what got to me was that the dialogue tags are for some reason on a new line. That drove me bananas. It really disrupts the flow of reading. you think that there's just not going to be a dialogue tag, which is a perfectly fine choice a lot of the time. So then you go down, you read the next line thinking it's going to be a a new thing, and it's just what should have been a continuation of the last sentence. I have never seen another author do that.
And there's a reason for that. And I was relieved when the perspectives started trending more interior and I didn't have to keep tripping over the randomly separated dialogue tags. I thought that was very silly. I also did notice a few words that felt wildly out of place in this time setting. I think if you're Irish and you have an understanding of how people spoke 60 years ago, there's a chance this book would drive you up the [ __ ] wall. It managed to skate by with a lot of stuff because as a Canadian reader, I'm like, well, like the Irish affect written out feels old timey enough for me, like this all tracks in the least offensive way possible. But then every once in a while there would be a word that stood out as so specifically 21st century that I would lose immersion. I'm not saying that these aren't words that people said back then or that they were created in 2010, but if you look at a graph of usage over time, words like diversify and performative were simply like objectively not used then as much as they are now. Like, does she even have a full formal education? I could really see the author's 2026 hand in those moments. And I think that it would be even more distracting for people who know more about history and language and who care more about historical accuracy.
To me, it was not an issue. I mostly just thought it was a little bit funny.
The biggest problem this book had was that it didn't hold back enough. I'm not going to spoil anything, but there are quite a few reveals in here. There are things it wants you to wonder about and drops heavyhanded hints at the truth of, and I wish it had played its cards a little closer to the chest. There are too many moments where it will finally pretty expressly tell you what happened, something that it's been hinting at, but it won't outright say it. There will be a little bit of interpretation left to you, except it will then follow it up with immediately giving you the whole reveal, every single part of the story that it's been hiding laid bare. I wanted both for the hints dropped before these moments to be cut to like 50% because I kept feeling like it gave me enough to pretty much know what was going on and then it hammered it home like eight times. like it was truly like, hey, listen up. That was not just a comment made in passing. That's an important thing that you need to remember for later on. And then the other thing, I also wanted to be given more time between the confirmation of what I think is happening that is still relying on me to fill in some gaps and do some interpreting and have some curiosity and it just telling me everything. Make me wait for it. Make me want it. Even like get me a little bit frustrated at how koi you're being. That would be better than this. I think those changes would have greatly improved the book and might have even bumped it to a five star. There is nothing that I love more than being shocked in a satisfying way and it is hard to pull off. I totally get that. But I think that Howorth has the skill to do it and she just needed to believe in herself and her readers a little bit more. This is not a book that had five-star potential that hugely disappointed me though. I felt pretty satisfied with it and I think I would recommend it pretty enthusiastically if you want a moody atmospheric book about yearning and repression with a capital R and connecting to other women when you're surrounded by men who see you as an object, but then actually that connection is is mostly just like lust and then obsession. I think this is a great read for you if that's what you want. And I enjoyed my time with it. I have like very little to back up my like for it though. Like if someone made a compelling enough argument, I think it would it could there's there's a chance it would sway me down an entire star. I obviously don't feel all that strongly about it, but from where I'm sitting right now, it was good and I had fun.
I'm going to go get started reading A Good Person by Kristen King, and I will see you to talk about it in the next video. That was not my choice. I made a poll and everybody voted for it. Don't kill me. I'll never do it again. I'm just trying to get a video out. It's been like a month and a half. Okay.
Goodbye.
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