★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital. | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A fun, palate-cleansing read.
Themes: living with your mistakes and regrets, starting over. It’s never too late to begin again on your own terms. Also: how awful family can be. How awful people in power treat their subjects. The ending was jolting, but comforting in a way.
Highlights
Anybody who doesn’t think men are hopeless, revolting pigs should take a good long look inside a prison laundry.
One thing I learned in prison is that sometimes rotten things fly off people’s tongues because they’re mean, but mostly it’s because they’re scared.
“The problem with retrospect is it never shows up beforehand.”
One by one they set down their pens, then looked up at Harriet, faces confident, obliging, readable. This moment never failed to break her in half.
Retired people were often thought to be lonely, but it wasn’t that. It was the feeling of uselessness, of being done with it all.
I used to race through books one after another, but in Book Club Harriet taught us that when you slow down, you notice more, and when you notice more, you feel more. Reading one book makes it part of all the books you’ve ever read, Harriet said, so she was forever dragging other books into our discussions.