Ruta Sepetys’s third novel, Salt to the Sea, is a story of three Eastern European refugees, one German soldier, and their ill-fated voyage on the Wilhelm Gustloff, the deadliest maritime accident. Told through the alternating perspectives of these four characters — Joana, Emilia, Florian, and Alfred — Sepetys’s storytelling reels us into the frigid winter of 1945, where the characters meet each other.

Though the four different perspectives might have been confusing at first, each character has their own distinct voice, story, and desire that propels them as they try to escape the Soviet army. The one that stood out to me the most was Alfred. We meet him through his mental love letters to Hannelore, who we first assume is his girlfriend from back home, only to discover she was his Jewish-German neighbor who was taken away by Hitler Youth soldiers after Alfred reported her father. Alfred is unlikable, delusional, psychopathic, gross, and a raging Nazi. Sepetys’s choice to include him as a character surprised me, as did her subtle questioning of masculinity through his character — what happens when a boy, who was pushed around his entire life, is given a position of power through a Nazi uniform?

The relationship between Joana and Florian also stood out to me. Consistent with her other books (see Josie and Jesse from Out of the Easy and Lina and Andrius from Between Shades of Gray), it’s clear from the second the characters meet that they will fall in love. While the romance doesn’t dominate the novel (which would have felt inappropriate), there are instances where Sepetys made choices to further Joana and Florian’s relationship that felt ill-timed, if not at the expense of other characters. An example of this is after Ingrid gets shot by Russian planes and falls through the frozen lagoon she was walking across. Joana moves to run across the lagoon to save her friend, endangering her life. When the group she’s traveling with rushes to save her, Florian is the one who pulls Joana onto his lap, where she rests her face against his chest as she cries. The chapter ends with Florian wanting but struggling to put his arms around Joana as she grieves her friend. Emilia appears and puts his arms around her for him, and the chapter ends right there, switching off to one of Alfred’s letters to Hannelore. Ingrid’s death is monumental for Joana, who was close friends with her, and for the whole group, who relied on her keen hearing (a result of her blindness) to alert them of Russian soldiers and planes. To wrap up the scene of her death by focusing on Joana and Florian’s budding romance felt distasteful. Throughout the novel, Emilia is aware of Joana and Florian’s feelings for one another (perhaps because it reminds her of her romance with August, which she made up as a coping mechanism). Because of this, it makes sense that Emilia would put Florian’s arms around Joana, but I think it would have been much more meaningful to have Emilia comfort Joana herself and to have seen that relationship grow. Having two girls who have experienced loss comfort one another would have been much more impactful than using a character’s death to push a romantic interest closer together.

The novel ends with Joana, Florian, Klaus, and Emilia’s baby Helinka getting rescued by a German torpedo boat. An epilogue tells us that Joana and Florian raised Klaus and Helinka as their own and that Emilia’s body washed ashore on a Danish couple’s land, where she was buried. Like Sepetys’s other books, the characters received a nice, happy ending — or, as happy as an ending to a story as harrowing as this one can be. Yet part of it felt rushed; their rescue from the Gustloff ended at an odd place, and twenty-four years passed with the flip of a page.

All in all, Ruta Sepetys’s third novel is an incredible work of historical YA fiction. In her author’s note she writes that she wanted to give a voice to those who were written out of history, for one reason or another. Salt to the Sea does just that.

“I have a pact with myself not to think about money in the morning. I’m like a teenager trying not to think about sex. But I’m also trying not to think about sex.”

This is how we meet Casey Peabody, a 31-year-old woman living in Boston in 1997. Working as a waitress in Harvard Square as she tries to finish up the novel she’s spent the past six years working on, Casey is overwhelmed with $70,000 worth of student loan debt, grieving the recent unexpected loss of her mother, and fresh off the tails of a relationship that ended terribly. It seems everything that could go wrong is going wrong for her, and though some of these misfortunes — let alone all of them together — might be hard to imagine for some readers, Casey is everything but unrelatable. The way Lily King creates her characters, writes the dialogue, and narrates Casey’s inner voice is all done so seamlessly, Writers & Lovers reads like a memoir, from how intimate it feels.

We’re not too far into the novel when Casey gets caught between two men, both writers she happened to meet on the same night: Oscar, a widow and successful author with two children, and Silas, the flaky but intriguing aspiring writer. Oscar’s steadiness draws Casey to him: he can offer her the idyllic family life she never had, and that feeling of safety that feels attractive as ever to Casey as her life falls apart around her. And though Silas is a boy compared to Oscar — 31 against the latter's 45 — his youth and instability is part of what draws Casey to him, as it feels familiar: his smelly car and cramped apartment is closer to Casey than Oscar’s colonial house and two young boys will ever be. While these relationships progress and drama ensues, Casey always remains at the center of the novel. Casey and her struggles — her grief, stress, and anxiety — are never overshadowed by these men.

The novel reaches its climax when the landlord of the moldy shed she lives in evicts her. Looking for a place to rent in Boston with her limited salary and loan companies threatening to seize portions of her wages, all the while dealing with dozens of rejection letters from agents about the book she just finished, Casey begins to struggle. She can’t sleep, can’t eat, and can’t get through a shift without having an anxiety attack. What I appreciate about this novel is how Casey never gets “saved” — not by anybody, and especially not by Oscar, who she “chose” over Silas after his flakiness scared her off. If anything, her relationship with Oscar is another stressor.

Things begin to look up for Casey when she lands an agent and finds a new job as an English teacher. Her medical scare — a lump on her breast she feared was cancerous — turned out to be a false alarm, and she finally spreads out the rest of her mother’s ashes. This isn’t an unrealistically happy fairy-tale ending, but instead the culmination of a young woman finding herself, as a writer and as a person.

I went through this book faster than I’ve finished any other novel in a very long time; I loved every last thing about it. I love how the dialogue rips back and forth between characters, and I love the relationship between Casey and Muriel (such a good representation of female friendship). I love the way Casey criticizes men and their masculinity, not in a self-pitying way but the way a woman living in the patriarchy would, with landlords undermining her work and men grabbing her waist as she takes their orders. I particularly love how King created John and Jasper, Oscar’s two young boys: loving, sweet, and openly affectionate towards Casey. They’re also an incredibly stark contrast to the other men in the novel, like Clark the chef, who calls her a cunt and threatens to get her fired; Luke, her ex-boyfriend that toyed with her emotions weeks after her mother’s death only to ghost her just as she discovers he was a married man; Rob, Casey’s father, a math teacher and sports coach at her high school who drilled holes into the wall near his office so he could peep into the girl’s changing room; and even Oscar, their father, who Casey soon realizes was self-obsessed and pushed away women who were more successful than him. Including these loving young boys after all of these horrible, disappointing men makes one question how we as a society raise our boys, particularly in adolescence.

Though this was King’s fifth novel, this was my first time reading a book of hers. I very much look forward to reading every other thing she’s ever written; I would even read her grocery lists.

Told from an insightful third-person narration, My Grandmother Told Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is a novel about seven-year-old Elsa and the make-believe land her Granny invented, called the Land-of-Almost-Awake. Though not yet eight years old, Elsa has had her share of difficulties: her parents are divorced, her mother is pregnant with a half-sibling Elsa knows will ruin her life, and her only friend is her Granny. But the worst thing happens when Granny dies unexpectedly of cancer, leaving Elsa angry, alone, and grief-stricken.

After Granny’s death, Elsa discovers that the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the stories Granny told her are more tied to reality than she thought. The princesses, knights, soldiers, queens, and angels from the stories she used as an escape turn out to be her neighbors, and the tales are more real than she expected. As she discovers the letters Granny left her and delivers them to their recipients, Elsa is able to better know her neighbors and her family.

With endearing messages and careful storytelling, My Grandmother Told Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is a whimsical novel about love, imagination, and giving people second chances. While the world-building and creativity in this novel are astounding and impressive, there are parts of the novel that fell short of what I expected, given how highly recommended this book was.

The charm of the novel seems to lie in Elsa’s relationship with Granny. Getting behind the plot of the novel, which revolves around the adventure Granny leaves for Elsa, is difficult when it’s made clear how angry Elsa is after Granny’s death, and how upset she becomes with the task her grandmother left her. In sympathizing with Elsa, a young girl whose only friend has just passed, I found it irresponsible and selfish of Granny to leave a grieving seven-year-old with such a daunting task. And though meant to be charming, Granny’s relationship with Elsa is also difficult to get behind. While Granny is always there for Elsa and is, at many times, her only supporter, multiple characters including Elsa’s father admit to limiting their relationship with Elsa so as not to get in the way of her relationship with Granny. While I assume the intention of that was to emphasize how special the bond between the two was, it made their relationship feel unhealthy and very strange.

Other aspects of the novel were also unrealistic, which made it rather annoying to read. Elsa is written as incredibly intelligent for her age, but she is precocious to the point where it’s not believable. Her treatment of the dog, which she referred to as the wurse, was also strange and unrealistic - she constantly fed it chocolate, even though chocolate is incredibly poisonous for dogs. While it is a minor detail, it’s mentioned numerous times and I didn’t get the point of repeating something that was outright impossible. A lot of the secondary characters were also incredibly two-dimensional: there is Alf who was grumpy and liked coffee; George who is outgoing and likes eggs; friendly Lennart and Maud, who bake an obscene amount of cookies; and Britt-Marie, who is uptight and nosy. Although we do get a glimpse of these characters’ backstories towards the end of the book, it came too late in the novel to change the way I saw them and to make up for how irritating some of them were, particularly Britt-Marie, throughout the majority of the novel.

The biggest issue I personally had with the novel was how incredibly boring and dense it was. A lot of the beginning of the novel is spent describing the Land-of-Almost-Awake and telling the reader the stories Granny tells Elsa. I found these parts to be almost impossible to read: so many paragraphs were devoted to explaining the five kingdoms in the land, and they were all so long and dense. I lost interest immediately, and I would not have finished the book if it wasn’t because I had to for my Senior Project.

Ultimately, I believe that the charm of the book resided on the reader sympathizing with Elsa and her Granny. The only moments I was able to do so were during the interactions with Elsa’s school’s headmaster and the moments where we could see Elsa grieving. For the entire rest of the book, I was either annoyed or bored. The novel has some cute, vulnerable moments in the end and important messages throughout, but I personally felt they got lost in the rest of the novel.