Receive Your Copy Early Morning Riser Illustrated By Katherine Heiny Available As Printable Format

though Ive had my rescue Australian Shepherd dog for four years now, my heart still bursts when I walk him and watch his little ears bouncing as he resolutely chugs along.
And it bursts even more like fully burstcherrytomatopasta bursts when I think of how shitty his first, prerescue year of life was, and how happy he at least seems to be now.
Likewise, I felt like my heart was exploding the entire time reading this book from how good it was, and what types of themes it addresses, and how talented and unique and funny! an author Heiny is.
Even now, just thinking about it, my inner organs feel like theyre rearranging themselves in an emotionally volatile but ultimately happy polka,

This is a book about moments like that that keep us all chugging along through the walk of life, how as Aldous Huxley and many others have well said, we are not what happens to us we are what we do with what happens to us.
This is a book about the complicated beauty of IRL, face to face relationships and of created family, as well as the kind of family that makes you want to stomp your feet and holler at any age, “I didnt ask to be born!” It is a book about the wonder and unbeatable pleasures of the daytoday, and how we need to remember to resolutely live only for those things that make our hearts cherrytomato burst, and fuck all the rest of it!

Heiny is one of my favorite authors and, as Ill tell anyone wholl listen, an author I got to hear at a local book festival, and she is a lovely human if she were a Great Lake, shed be Superior.
I just feel like she captures interior life what mine feels like anyway, or at least the interior life of anyone with some very basic sense of humor and humility better than anyone Ive read.


As an added bonus Id no idea of her Michigan connection, but this is where I grew up, And in a time when I, as a transplantedtotheEastCoaster, am often surrounded by people content to glibly dismiss the entire US interior as a flyover zone, she welcomely captures the it can be savage and breathtaking beauty of northern Michigan, the qualities and quirks and nuances and humanity that Midwesterners can demonstrate at their very best, and how living in touch with four very distinct, but also often snowy seasons, largely at the mercy of the weather, and surrounded by aweinspiring reminders of glaciation and geography and time and the relative tinyness and fragility of human life can all inspire a sense of necessary community and a kind of personal mindfulness and gratitude in the small things that really matter, long before these things were trends.

Five, Giant, Great LakesShaped Stars,

Also, one quick note: as a native Michigander, I know our cool geography is unfortunately most misunderstood seriously, check out the subreddit r/MapsWithoutUP, so I need to clarify.
This book is NOT set in the Upper Peninsula UP of Michigan, but rather in Northern Lower Michigan the part that looks like a mitten.
Which is also a peninsula a landmass surrounded mostly by water, which is the first thing drilled into an elementary school Michigosling but the Lower Peninsula is securely saddled to Ohio, which is a lot for any landmass to bear lol sorry Buckeyes, love you!, whereas the UP is tethered to much less.
Hold out your right hand in front of you, put your fingers tightly together, and stick your thumb out to aboutoclock, and with this book were roughly talking about the part of the state around the edges of your ring finger between the pinky and middle finger.
This is by far the coolest perk of past or present Michigan residency, to be able to do this, The UP is the other large part of Michigan, again often omitted from or incorrectly labeled in maps, that is above the entirety of the mitten part and looks kind of like a misshapen, westwardfacing sleeping rabbit drawn by a child this is actually sort of a controversy, what it looks like: the mitten part sets an unbeatably high standard, and does NOT belong to Canada or Wisconsin.

While the UP is also savagely beautiful, like tear your eyes out with a fishhook beautiful, it is also its own whole vast and brave new world an extremely distinct and different place and culture, worthy of its own awesome novels.


Also: PopSugarReading Challenge: A book with the same title as a song, Book RiotRead Harder Challenge: A book set in the Midwest, I bought into the review hype and so I only have myself to blame, This was the most dull book about small life living people, If the characters were developed and felt like they had any depth, maybe it could be something worth reading, If the story included the big, messy bits instead of skipping ahead so the character could say “well that happened”, then it would begin to feel interesting.
If the story was not set up in such simple, obvious ways, perhaps I would not think it was so lazy, The drama was entirely removed from any of the “plot” points, This is milquetoast. I know we are all fried and exhausted and experiencing stress in these pandemic times, but seriously, I don't have anything specific that I didn't like about this book but the story simply didn't pull me in, I didn't care about the characters, Also, the narrator sounded very weird imitating men's voices, wish she stayed more natural, Wonderfully and hysterically written!
RTC to come!,
In many ways, this was a very Tyleresque novel it is about ordinary people, living ordinary lives in a small town in Michigan.

We follow the life of twentysixyearold, Jane, who moved to Boyne City to be a secondgrade teacher,
She starts a relationship with fortytwo year old, divorced carpenter and oddjobs man, Duncan, Duncan was quite the ladies' man, The relationship is going smoothly until Jane realises that it wasn't going anywhere, as Duncan wasn't the marrying again kind of man,
A car accident and a few other happenings bring Jane and Duncan together again, and his exwife and her husband,
Heiny did a good job showing the ups and downs of life, the absurd, the mundane, the boredom of raising small children, occasionally interspersed by levity, cuteness, and pleasant surprises.


I'm bummed out I didn't love this more, It's got all the ingredients that I usually appreciate in a novel, but I never fully got invested in what happened to the characters.

.stars. The whole time I was reading this book I kept thinking about what a little marvel it is, And I know it is Heiny's specialty, but still, She doesn't really follow any of the rules about how to make a novel draw the reader in and move them along just so.
For the first third or so not much even happens, And outside of one large turning point part way through, not much else happens, And yet! I wanted to ditch all my obligations to read this book all day, Heiny is just the kind of writer I like, she isn't too fussy but she has a deep emotional wisdom that you get to partake of all throughout the book.


Jane makes one very understandable mistake right away: she falls in love with Duncan, She is new to their small town and he is gorgeous with a sweet and sunny disposition, so you cannot blame her, Except Duncan has slept with every woman in town and the surrounding counties to boot, And if he seems like an obviously bad bet at the beginning of the book, it does not stay that way, Not because Duncan changes at all, he is a constant, It's Jane who changes, and she spends the book wondering what she wants,

This is a small town book populated with quirky characters, Jane is not quirky and she often chides herself for unkind thoughts while she observes others, though outwardly she is reliable and caring for the friendships she finds herself in over the years.
Personally I think Jane does not give herself enough credit, I would not be inviting my friend who always ends evenings pulling out her mandolin and singing, nor would I enjoy spending so much time with my boyfriend's exwife.
Jane can turn on a dime from loving her friends or Duncan or her mother to needing them to immediately leave her presence, which was one of the most relatable things about her.
Spending time in Jane's head felt a lot like home to me, Jane is also a second grade teacher and basically every scene with her students was one where I laughed out loud, While this is often a sad book, it is more often a funny book and I laughed a lot, I also cried. Two for one.

One important part of the plot is Jimmy, Duncan's "assistant," who has an unidentified cognitive or developmental delay, They are in the kind of small town where everyone knows Jimmy and does a bit of looking out for Jimmy, But we do not live in a world that is set up for people like Jimmy to be adequately cared for, And everyone chipping in is far from an effective system for an adult who lacks the capacity to fully care for himself, How Jimmy is involved in Jane's life changes over the course of the book, but I appreciated how the book viewed him as a full characterJane will sometimes get frustrated with him just as she will with everyone elsebut not having him as a plot device or a person who stays in the background of the story until needed.
Jimmy is all over it, and it felt like a solid portrayal of disability, specifically adult disability that we don't get to see very often.


The thing that is very hard about this book if you are a person like me is that Jane just does not talk to Duncan about the things that she should.
She has her reasons she is terrified of what Duncan will say but this is not a book where Jane and Duncan are able to build themselves a better relationship thanks to good communication.
It is a book where almost no communication between them takes place, If you, like me, are guilty of living most of your romantic relationships in your own head rather than spoken out loud between you and your partner, this will all feel eerily familiar, and I can attest to its accuracy.


I would just like to read a million Katherine Heiny books that are set deep in the minds of a character, where you grow to feel deeply connected to and invested in them.
It was truly a lovely experience, Early Morning Riser is a poignant and laughoutloud funny story about love and family and how those can appear in very different ways.


Jane moves to the small town of Boyne City, Michigan, and its not long before shes fallen for Duncan, the towns locksmith and woodworker.
Hes handsome, charming, and has dated nearly every woman in Boyne City at some point, but that doesnt dissuade Jane from getting into a relationship with him.




While running into women hes dated through the years or relatives of theirs can sometimes be awkwardand unexpected when it happens in neighboring townsJane has made peace with that.
But its harder to share Duncan with so many people, especially his exwife, Aggie, her doddering new husband Gary, and Jimmy, Duncans coworker.
Duncan still mows Aggie and Garys lawn because Gary doesnt care for lawnmowers,

But one splitsecond decision, one car accident, changes everything Jane had thought about marriage and family, Suddenly Janes life is inextricably connected to Jimmys, which also means to Duncan, Aggie, and Gary, Her future takes a far different path than she was thinking in some ways, but is that a bad thing

Early Morning Riser is an absolutely fantastic book.
It moves from, spanning the lives of these characters and a few more, Freida, Janes best friend, cracked me up so many times, I literally was laughing hysterically throughout the book and tearing up in other places, because Katherine Heiny is such an insightful storyteller,

Heinys first novel, Standard Deviation, was one of my favorite books of, so Im not sure what took me so long to read this one, but I loved it.
Itll definitely make my yearend best list! Thanks to my friend sitelinkAndy for the reminder!

Check out my list of the best books I read inat sitelink blogspot. com/thebestbooksireadin. html.

See all of my reviews at sitelinkitseithersadnessoreuphoria, blogspot. com.

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