by Gracie LaRue

I picked up Meghan Maclean Weir’s novel The Book of Essie when I first started working at Lemuria back in June. It had been about two weeks since I had finished reading my last novel, Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman, and I realized that while not reading a book for two weeks is considered normal in the outside world, it is absolutely unacceptable in the world of Lemurians. No one was judging me for my reading slump, but I grew exceedingly self-conscious around my coworkers who seemed to be reading a book every other night.

I finally chose The Book of Essie to break my non-reading streak, and I was determined to not give up on it. So when I was on a plane on my way to Turks and Caicos for a senior trip, finding myself about a third of the way into the novel and questioning whether or not I should continue, I felt defeated. Would I ever read another book again? I was debating sliding the book back into my carry on when I scanned the page I was on and saw a mention of the school I’ll be attending this fall: The University of the South, which is relatively small, so I took this random coincidence as a sign that the wind spirits wished me to continue in my endeavor, and I sure am glad that I listened to them.

The Book of Essie was a budding flower that showed promise of blooming but took a while to do so; However, when it did bloom, it bloomed quickly. The story is centered around Esther Ann Hicks, “Essie,” the seventeen-year-old daughter in a family that seems vaguely similar to the real-life family the Duggars, featured in TLC’s show 19 Kids and Counting. If you watched this show and kept up with the highly religious family, then you are probably aware of the scandals that are attached to their name.

Like the Duggars, the fictional Hicks family presents a flawless version of themselves on their extremely popular reality show Six for Hicks, where, since Essie was barely old enough to talk, cameras have been following the ultra-conservative Pastor Hicks and his sermons in a megachurch, Essie’s psychotic mother who presents herself as the angel of all moms when the recording button is clicked, and Essie and the rest of her siblings. But in the past four seasons of the show, Essie’s sister, Libby, has managed to avoid the cameras, as well as all communication with her family. When Essie finds herself pregnant, she decides it is finally time to find out where her sister has been all of these years, and why she so desperately sought release from the family that begins to suffocate Essie as well.

Weir introduces a variety of characters as the novel unfolds, showing just enough of each one to let the reader decide who really stands on the side of good or evil. Written in first person, but with chapters switching between the narratives of Essie and her two more-than-meets-the-eye accomplices (the high school jock Roarke and the journalist Liberty Bell), the quest to unravel the troubling facade upheld by the Hicks family is a testimony to the hypocrisy and flaws so often found in today’s “perfect American family.”

When you finish the novel, you’ll probably feel how I did, angry at how today’s society is so quick to support menaces cloaked in celebrity status and righteousness, but you’ll also hopefully feel invigorated by the story’s enthralling twists and calls for justice. Or maybe, like me, you’ll at least feel a sense of pride for finally reading something to completion.

The nameless narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh is selfish. Like, really selfish. She also makes sure to remind the reader every so often of how pretty and thin she is. But I can’t help but like her. Go figure. It’s the year 2000, and the narrator has decided to put her life on hold and hibernate for a year. She goes to the yellow pages and accidentally finds the worst psychiatrist in New York City. Faking insomnia to get sleeping pills, her psychiatrist throws every pill possibly related to this condition at her. This suits her just fine as she thinks up new cocktails of pharmaceuticals to take to make her sleep more and dream less.

I’ll be honest and say that hibernating for a year sounds extremely appealing. Who wouldn’t want to sleep around the clock? We see the reader only when she’s awake every couple of days. We follow her to the bodega around the corner where she gets two large coffees that she guzzles on the way back to her apartment where she watches Whoopi Goldberg movies until she falls back asleep. We attend the psychiatrist appointments, seeing just how frenzied and choppy Dr. Tuttle is. The narrator’s best friend Reva visits her at least once a week, and we see how much Reva irritates her. She says, “I loved Reva, but I didn’t like her anymore.”

One of the pills the narrator gets is one called Infermiterol. The upside of it is that it makes her sleep deeply; the downside is that she starts having blackout episodes where she goes shopping, makes spa appointments, and makes calls to people she’d really rather not talk to. She has no memory of these episodes, only seeing the aftermath of things having been moved around when she wakes up. On one such blackout, she wakes up on a train, wearing a white fur coat she doesn’t remember buying, headed to Reva’s mother’s funeral.

It’s hard to put my finger on what I liked about this book so much. The narrator is a borderline sociopath who has a toxic relationship with everyone in her life. She has an awful older on-again-off-again again boyfriend who keeps dumping her for women his age. Her relationship with her parents when they were alive was not ideal. In spite of all of this, there’s just something relatable about wanting to cocoon yourself in your bedroom and hopefully wake up when all your problems are solved.