Review: Fin & Lady

In a recent Top Ten Tuesday over at The Broke and the Bookish, the topic was Books To Read If You Like These TV shows, movies, plays etc. What a intriguing challenge, right? But I couldn’t come up with anything, so I didn’t participate. Then, my copy of Fin & Lady arrived, a book I’d ordered after a glowing recommendation from my sister-in-law. “I loved it so much,” she said, “it really reminded me of books like A Separate Peace or The Catcher in the Rye.” On that basis, I couldn’t resist!

Once I’d finished it, Fin & Lady really reminded me of two other books: Beautiful Ruins, which I read and reviewed in January and Breakfast at Tiffany’s , which takes place in the same time and setting, with a girl-about-town central character. There’s certainly a coming-of-age aspect with Fin, who begins as a child and progresses through adulthood as the book progresses, and it’s really his story that is being told to the narrator. Just as with Beautiful Ruins, I wish I had read this book a month or so from now, because I think it would read very well on a sunny beach or poolside somewhere, partly because at one point, we travel to the Mediterranean, but also the book never gets quite deep enough to mar a lovely sunny day. I don’t feel like I ever really got inside of Lady’s head, but then again, no one in the book seems to either. As much as she and Fin are tied together, even in the title, everyone in the narrative is really revolving around Lady, who spins erratically on her own axis.