Lindsey Rogers CookCritiques

My review of this book can be found on my YouTube Vlog at:

https://youtu.be/9ZST6ZQ2ZHk

Enjoy!

4 stars, Highly readable

LEARNING TO SPEAK SOUTHERN
by Lindsey Rogers Cook

This novel is highly readable, it deals with the loss of a woman's brother and she returns home after a long absence to settle his affairs.

Much obliged to #sourcebooks for the complimentary copy of #learningtospeaksouthern I was under no obligation to post a review.

This was a really good, heartfelt novel. It really reminds us that we really don’t know what people are going through or may have in the past and to not be so judgmental, as things often are not as they may be appearing. Lex is heading back to the US after having been on an “adventure” for the last few years, and she is heading back to the last place she said she’d return to.

Cami meets Lex with open arms, and knew she’d be back – it was just a matter of time before something brought her back, and Cami is more than happy to open her home up to her once again. Cami was a good friend to Lex’s mother, and was a second mother to Lex growing up, and often was the word of reason when her and her mother got in their weekly spats. Lex never quite understood her mothers anger towards her and has always struggled with her childhood, and never feeling like she was good enough.

Lex may not be so different from her mother after all, and Cami possibly has the answers she’s always wanted answered but in order to get these- she must complete tasks that Cami gives her each day. Keeping Lex busy, and her mind off of taking off again and her last task might just be the hardest thing she does- as she’s always owed that person an explanation.

Thank you to Sourcebooks Landmark for the free book. I look forward to picking up her other novel and will be reading any others she publishes in the future. I really liked how she brought it all together and had a lesson in it all.

I had some doubts about the dysfunctional family aspect of the book to begin with but believe me...Lex and her family are dysfunctional with a capital D. Lex and her mother had a love/hate relationship, although there seemed not have been any love involved there at all. Lex also had never planned to ever return home. Of all the characters, Grant and Cami were the only ones that I actually liked...Lex never really came through for me although I understood why she was like she was to her family. Since her mother being dead was the reason she returned home, I would have thought she would have made more of an effort to perhaps learn and understand why her parents were like they were. It wasn’t a bad story by any means but I came away feeling slightly dirty. What the reader does learn is we need to be extremely careful of our words and our actions as they shape our lives and our outcomes more than we may never know. I once heard someone say that “A person may forget what you say. They might never understand what you do...but they will never ever forget how you made them feel.” This family should have had that little quote framed and hung in every room of the house.

5 stars, Love is irreplaceable

HOW TO BURY YOUR BROTHER by Lindsey Rogers Cook

Alice loved her older brother Rob. He taught her so much, in the years before he disappeared. He ran away when he was 15 and Alice was 10. Their parents wanted them to be a part of the perfect little Southern gentry. Alice was devastated when Rob disappeared. Their mother destroyed every physical item that had anything to do with Rob. Secrets were kept from Alice. The book opens with Rob's death. She never talked to Rob or saw him alive, ever again.

Alice returns to her mother's home, after her mother's mental decline and need for the structured environment of an institution. She finds a stack of letters that Rob had left for several different people, many that she had never heard of before. She decides to take the time to deliver as many of the letters as she can.

I had mixed feelings about this novel, for starters, the title sounds sinister, but in reality, it is about how a loving sister copes with all of the turmoil in her life and reacts to the secrets that are coming out all over the place.

Much appreciation to #sourcebooks for the complimentary copy of #howtoburyyourbrother I was under no obligation to post a review.

Unfortunately, this book didn’t hit me the way I wanted it to, though plotwise there was a lot of potential.

The story starts after Rob’s suicide; Alice finds a box of letters written from her brother to various people in his life — a life she didn’t know that much about because he ran away when he was fifteen. Finally gathering up the courage to address what happened to her brother in the years they were apart, Alice delivers the letters herself and embarks on a journey to find the answers.

The plot had a lot there, but honestly I was a little confused by the chronology of things. There were things that were happening in the current timeline, but also long passages about previous occurrences with Alice and with Robinson, and it was kind of difficult to follow.

The characters were also quite interesting, but I was more connected to the present timeline with Alice and Walker and their children than with Robinson and what happened to him. Because the story started after his suicide and was so strongly in Alice’s perspective, it was honestly hard to care about Robinson and connect with him.

One thing that I really enjoyed was Alice’s character development in the present, and how even though she was given a little romance sub-plot, that did not put a halt to the mystery and her personal growth, which she kept trying to find.

The writing style was honestly a little slow for me. The first half felt like nothing was happening, and the last part felt like things were revealed very quickly, but not in a satisfying way where our main character found things out slowly and pieced them together herself, but rather because the information was handed to her in the form of a letter or just by someone telling it to her.

Ultimately, this book was just kind of “stuffy” to me. It was hard to get through because the characters were distant and the plot was slow. In more abstract terms, I appreciate the main character’s development and I appreciate the plot arc, but in execution it was hard to get through the novel.

How to Bury Your Brother by Lindsey Rogers Cook is a highly recommended look at a dysfunctional Southern family with secrets.

Alice's best friend, her brother Rob, ran away at age fifteen. She was five years younger than him and has missed him ever since then. Two decades later she is attending his funeral. His death, her mother tells her, was a heart attack due to an overdose on Oxycontin. She never had closure over his disappearance and death, so eight years later when her mother is in a memory care facility and she is cleaning out her mother's house she is shocked to come across Rob's guitar and a stack of seven letters he has written to various people. She also finds an autopsy report showing her family's lies. Alice is hurt that her mother hid all of this and never said a word to her. She is also hurt that she is not among the letter recipients, but she decides to find the people Rob wrote to and give them the letter he wrote to them years earlier.

This is a well-written, perceptive novel of dark secrets that families keep hidden and the secrets that are exposed but not acknowledged. Alice must not only face the secrets uncovered in the letters, she must also admit to the problems in her own life. As Alice delivers the letters, both truths hidden in the past and those not confronted in the future are revealed. She discovers some truths about her brother while she reexamines her relationship with her mother and, ultimately, she learns something about herself. While the pacing of the plot is uneven and interminably slow at times, it does pick up toward the end. Rob's story kept me reading. The final denouement is unexpected, but does tie in with the storyline.

Both Alice and her brother are well-developed characters. For all his problems, Rob becomes an appealing likeable character in the end after the letters are revealed. It is heartbreaking when he finally shares why he ran away. Alice mentions her husband's ongoing affair at the start but, much to my chagrin, just lets it slide without confrontation for much of the novel. Her inability to say something was off-putting. There were some other unanswered questions and encounters that made the end of the novel just a bit too pat for me. I do think this could be a good choice for bookclubs to discuss as there are plenty of issues presented that could evoke many reactions. 3.5

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Sourcebooks.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2020/05/how-to-bury-your-brother.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3329207307½

I have been thinking about my takeaway on this book and I am conflicted. I am having trouble finding the point, the import, the understanding of so much hurt and despair. So many subtexts run through this story but they circle back to the same issue, a sister’s love and loss of her brother. The repetition bothered me, the inability to shake off the constant self-doubt and waiting for the perfect time, place, thought to force everything to coalesce. It was so painful to watch the abuse, almost knowing but denying, feeling but discounting, seeing a life caving in day by day.

I didn’t dislike the book, I just didn’t much care for it. Thank you NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for a copy.