These Songs I Know By Heart is such a brilliant novel. Themes of humor, friendship, love and grief are prominent. Life changes but love and friendship remains the same. As I was reading this, I felt like I was at the table with my best friends talking about all the points in our lives, I seriously did not want this book to end for that reason. This novel also touches on fertility and IVF, which hits quite close to home for me, but was done with such class and perfection.

Thank you to Book*hug Press and Net Galley for the ARC

These Songs I Know By Heart feels like a deep, heartfelt conversation with a friend. The narrator's tale, spanning from her 20s to her 40s, is a testament to the idea that life doesn't follow a set timeline. Her experiences with love, art, motherhood, and friendship are beautifully messy and real. The everyday struggles with moments of beauty during the pandemic are beautifully captured.

The setting out of the book in various tenses is an interesting format that I haven't come across before but works really well with the memoir-style prose. As Brubacher acknowledges, this novel is interwoven with experiences from her own life and it is hard to know which moments these are because the entire novel feels so relatable and real.

For anyone who's ever felt a little out of step with the world, this will help reassure you that there is no such thing as the "right" way to live.

Absolutely awful. The plot, characters, and writing are all dismal. There is nothing redeeming about this book; save your money

These Songs I Know By Heart was a joyfully introspective and formally inventive read. It reminded me of Sheila Heti's endeavours in the first-person, and I very much enjoyed the overlapping way that our narrator's story plays out. At its core, it's a book about selfhood even more so than it is a book about motherhood, and it evoked many questions for me that made me want to examine my own life in the same way the speaker examines hers.

An unnamed narrator is on a canoe camping trip with her friend Alice, sometime in the early pandemic years. She’s fortyish and trying to get pregnant; her life is full of people she calls things like The Kid (stepdaughter), The Turtle (partner), The Weaver (friend), Ex-Husband (first husband, who she’s amicably split from). This is a meditation on life, milestones and motherhood, and it is wonderfully delightful.

Told out of order - the narrator’s memories are woven into the act of camping, and written in sharp vignettes, this was really well-done. I loved how it was constructed, and completely lost myself in it, to the point I was shocked when it was over. It’s a sad, hopeful book - so exactly my jam, and the way Brubacher writes the spring of 2020 is so true to how it felt, but isn’t retraumatizing.

DNF - Simply put, this was probably a case of being the wrong reader. I wanted to like this but struggled to flow alongside the narrative.

I absolutely loved this book. A story told through a collection of pitch perfect vignettes, we see the life of our protagonist pieced together like scraps of a patchwork quilt. Humour, love, friendship, grief and what it means to be a woman are all facets of this journey and story. People weave in and out, time shifts, friendships morph over the years but love is a constant thing. This is such a perfect thing I wanted it to go on and on.

I think the major emphasis on IVF and pregnancy in the last section of this books makes it not for me and maybe I should have known that by reading the description. Overall I found it quite disjointed and it didn’t connect with me.

This was the most beautiful book I have read in a long time, it had me feeling so many emotions throughout, even some I didn't expect to feel.