This was an enjoyable read. Well written and engrossing. A complex slice of life in the form of a book. The chapter with Louis may have broken me.

In a Nutshell: Could have been outstanding, but messed up big-time in its execution. Such a wasted opportunity! Don’t pick this up if you were expecting a story about a woman battling an emotional breakdown as the blurb promises; the focus is more on the man in her life.

Story Synopsis:
Thirty-eight-year-old Cat is having a heck of a day, and not in a good way. Within a few hours' span, she discovers that she is pregnant, she has cancer, and her husband has done something idiotic. Cat falls apart emotionally and runs away from her home, without telling her husband Donovan or her two young kids or anyone else.
What led to Cat's taking such a drastic decision? How do the people in her life respond?
We learn the above through various third-person perspectives, including that of Cat.


As the blurb focusses on Cat's snapping point after the traumatic events, I expected a strong woman-oriented story about a lady who either fights back against the issues confronting her, or ventures into an introspective reflection of what went wrong. This approach would have made the story brilliant, maybe even making it cross the 4-star mark for me. The initial few pages of the book are a testimony to how amazingly the book could have delivered had it kept the focus on Cat.
Sadly, this didn't happen. What I found instead was a hot mess.

Bookish Yays:
🌹 The book started off very well. The initial few chapters build up the perfect background for Cat and her emotional state.
🌹 Cat’s housemaid Lena is an immigrant, so from her perspective, we get to see a little about immigrant experience in Toronto, where the story is based.
🌹 A few of the sections come from the perspective of Cat’s daughter Isabelle. These were the best in terms of depth and emotions.

Bookish Nays:
🌵 The story begins a few days before the revelations come Cat's way, and ends a few months later. During the interim, we get to hear from Cat, her husband Donovan, her daughter Isabelle, her maid Lena, and one segment from a pet dog's perspective. The shifting points of view mean that we get to see Cat’s emotional conflict only in bits and pieces. When the other characters pick up the narrative baton, their perspective is about the problems *they* are facing than on what’s happening with Cat.
🌵 As mentioned in the blurb and above, one of the character’s we hear from is a dog. This had made me very curious. However, the dog handled the narration for just one chapter, and that was also just about average in execution. What I couldn’t understand was why the dog was given a voice while his owner Meredith, who has a much bigger role to play in the story, never gets a chance to show us her point of view.
🌵 I had expected the major focus to be on Cat. However, to my surprise and utter disappointment, Donovan is the character who is most often on page and who gets the maximum attention, and that too for things absolutely unrelated to Cat’s trauma. This would have been okay if Donovan had any redeeming qualities. Sadly, he is among the most perverted creeps I've read in fiction. His whole perspective, especially his attitude towards women, was infuriating. I would have still enjoyed the book if he had received at least some kind of comeuppance for his behaviour, but that angle is left dangling.
🌵 Because of the writing choice, the only character we truly get to know well is Donovan. The rest of the characters are fit into the book only as per convenience of the storyline. Even for major characters such as Cat, Meredith (the woman who takes Cat in) and Claudia (Cat’s sister), the motivation behind their behaviour is never clarified.
🌵 While the first half was still tolerable, the second half goes downhill. The ending is the worst part of the book. After all that build-up and the various subplots, we don't even get any closure. There are also many loopholes and unexplained plot points. My biggest doubt was how Claudia, who is always super busy and a hyper-involved mom, suddenly finds ample free time to spend at Donovan’s house after Cat leaves, without even bothering about her own husband and baby daughter.
🌵 How can a book use cancer in the blurb and then have it just in passing during the story? We get to see Cat’s first-hand experience only when she hears from her doctor about the diagnosis. After that, nothing. No pondering over treatment options, no worry of death, no chemotherapy, no insecurity over what would happen to her kids, nothing!
🌵 Cat’s track should have generated much sympathy and emotional upheaval in me, but I ended up feeling nothing because of how distanced she was kept. And this is truly a missed chance because the author showed me in the initial chapters that he *can* write women characters well. But Donovan the jerk spoiled the whole show by hogging the attention.
🌵 There are some embarrassingly outdated and insensitive remarks about issues like race, gender, weight, sexual orientation and so on. I know that it's not the author but the character spouting/thinking those ideas, and I also remember that this is supposedly a satirical novel, but it's still cringe-worthy to read. Most of the adult main characters also seem not to know how to talk in front of kids.


All in all, this would have been my kind of book had it actually been a dark satire as promised in the blurb. But because it forgot the cancer sufferer and chose to focus more on her annoying husband, I didn't enjoy the reading experience. I still believe that the premise had potential, but something went wrong in the execution.

Can't recommend this one as a cancer story or as a satire. Might be read as a character-oriented literary fiction; it works somewhat better that way.

2 stars. (3 stars if read without the blurb/genre in mind. 1 star if read keeping an eye on the blurb. Averaging the two.)

My thanks to Dundurn Press and NetGalley for the DRC of “Lump”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn't work out better.

I think this is in my top 5 worst books I’ve ever read. It had a little bit of the vibes of Like a House on Fire by Lauren McBrayer, but it was poorly written and unsexy. Filled with unlikeable white rich to upper middle class people who do detestable things. It also featured an underdeveloped person of color immigrant character. Trigger warnings abound including sexual assault, pregnancy loss, refusal to seek scientific medical treatment, and child harm.

Lump by Nathan Whitlock is a book that requires careful consideration while reading or an important detail can be missed.

After reading the synopsis I was so excited to read this, but it was a miss for me. I thought it would be more humorous but by then end I was just so angry at every single character for acting the way they did. The story didn’t pick up for a long time and once it did I felt like it went too fast and sort of skipped over the bigger plot points.

I can’t imagine having so many life changing things happen to you and your first instinct is to run away. Justice for Isabelle and Silas. And Claudia too, dang.

Not my usual read but as a mother I thought I would find it funny... I found it a bit cringey to be honest. It was an OK read but not one I would recommend,

To be honest, the cover easily swept me to request this then I eventually got accepted. It was a rapid movement of grasping what to do in a unfortunate yet unforgettable experiences. I'll definitely think that it could have been more highly executed. If given an opportunity, I'll get a finished copy of this one and read it again.

I have to start by saying I'm not sure what the point was of Lump. Described as a satirical look at a marriage that falls apart at the same time as a pregnancy and cancer diagnosis, the book just fell flat for me. There were multiple POV's which instead of pushing the story along just stalled it for me.

The husband and wife were both irritating and the husband lacked even one good quality. He lost his job because he groped a coworker and then just seemed to drink all day and daydream about women other than his wife. Cat for her part at least appears care for their two kids but when she finds out she is not only pregnant with another child she doesn't want but has breast cancer, she goes off the deep end.

Then there is their housekeeper, Not really sure why we need her POV except to complain about rich people and to show the difference in the way people live. I've read much better stories that emphasize the wage gap.

I have to point out that I am a breast cancer survivor, so for the life of me (literally), I don't understand Cat's reaction to her having cancer. For that matter, with so many POV's, Whitlock should have added Meridith's, I don't understand how she had so much control over a woman she barely knew or how she could just watch her waste away. This is not a typical result to breast cancer diagnosis.

The prose were well-written but I couldn't get past the annoying characters and the lack of direction of the story. I think it would have been told better in the third person instead of the POV's.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

This was a tough one to get through.
For the first 25 percent of this book I was pleasantly surprised with how much I was enjoying it. It felt like the author, Nathan Whitlock, was diving head first into intriguing and entertaining relationship dynamics and the inner monologue of distinctly unique characters.
The story moved in a direction I wasn't expecting, which was surprising and a bit disappointing. I feel that as the reader, we were denied the opportunity to continue one with the most interesting character of within the story due to changing perspectives and story focus. The book would have been much more satisfying had we continued on with this character's perspective while also getting the perspective of others.
Though I didn't love the direction of the last 30 percent of the book, I can't deny my appreciation for Whitlock's writing and character development.
This is one of the more unique books I've read lately and I applaud that while also wanting to caution potential readers that while you will be entertained and will have the opportunity to explore character depth within this book, the direction of the story and its ending do not tie things up with a pretty bow.

Thank you to the author, Dundurn Press, Rare Machines and NetGalley, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Billled as darkly satirical, this story is supposedly about a woman whose life implodes when she gets three lifechangingly bad pieces of news in one day. It's told in multiple POVs that seem to go in and out fairly randomly, and the flow is disturbed by many abrupt jumps with little to no follow-through. After the intro into the story, and being hit one after the other with news of betrayal on various fronts, the female main character effectively disappears out of the story. There are way too many loose threads, the characters are stereotypically awful across the board and I regret the time I spent reading this book.

What do you do when you are diagnosed with cancer, you're pregnant, there's not enough money coming in, you have two little children to raise, and your husband is a creep? LUMP by Nathan Whitlock is one exploration of that terrible reality in the character of Cat, the woman with the weight of the world on her shoulders. I enjoyed the multiple perspectives and interwoven plot lines, the setting of Toronto, and the everyday realities we all face, not generally so bleak and terrible. However, I did find it incredible that Cat put up with so much from her jerk of a husband and some of the other turns of plot also felt contrived. I received a copy of this book and these thoughts are my own, unbiased opinions.

Lump starts as an engaging domestic comedy about a middle-class Toronto family. Cat Joseph is dealing with familiar issues – caring for two small children while managing her web design business, and keeping the family’s finances together. Meanwhile her privileged and feckless husband, Donovan, swans around various local eateries, talking airily about a hypothetical future enterprise.

Events take a darker turn when Cat learns that she is pregnant and she has a malignant tumour on her breast. And that her husband is a creep. Something has to change – and the change Cat makes has massive consequences for them all.

Lump is narrated from a number of points of view – some close to the family, some more remote, but each of their small acts and omissions impacts on the fate of Cat and her family.

Lump keeps the reader pleasingly off balance. The characters are real and believable with minds of their own, including the children (even the dog-as-narrator does okay). I particularly enjoyed the narration of the family’s cleaner, Lena, a recent immigrant who has many wry observations on the oddities of Toronto life and reacts with resilience to the blows that life (and Cat’s family) deal her.

Apart from being glad I’ve never had children, the strongest response Cat evoked in me was the desire to shake her. (Don’t we all know a Cat in real life?) Why does she tolerate so much from her husband?

Throughout her life she seems to have been passive and always cave into selfish, manipulative characters. This is most obvious with Donovan, but we also see it with her sister, Claudia. The question which propels the story is whether she can break free of this trait.

The interleaving of comic set pieces and some horrific moments only highlights Cat’s heightened state and sense of isolation. Lump is funny, shocking and moving in equal measure.
*
I received a copy of Lump from the publisher via NetGalley.

Another one I really wanted to like but I just didn’t connect with anything. There was no one in here that I really wanted to root for, despite the very many perspectives (some, I found unnecessary). There’s also some plot points that I still question the relevancy of. But I still read to the end because I wanted to see where it was going and I do like books set in and around Toronto.

A decent read, the comedy was enough, and the storylines running in parallel were appreciative. Alternating from one perspective to another every chapter was entertaining.

The main character, Cat, is diagnosed with cancer in the middle of an unexpected pregnancy. She already has two small children; and with an absent husband and a meagre income, it is getting harder and harder to cope. She can only see one solution through the chaos: run away to her client’s house.

There are some family issues running in the background, her husband has problems in the workplace which involve a lawyer, and cancer is discussed rather strangely as a disease. It seemed like the characters, Cat and her eccentric client, didn’t take the illness as seriously as it should’ve been taken. However, given the novel is a satire with dark comedy maybe that was the point. The book also contained some scenes- like consent and extra-marital affairs- that seemed crass but still conformed to the satirical atmosphere.

Altogether, the book was written well for its genre and was appealing enough to keep reading.

I like weird books and dark humor so this description seemed right up my alley. The problem is it's not very funny. The characters are unlikable and I didn't get attached to even Cat, our main character. She finds out she has breast cancer and she's pregnant on the same day, and she's got a husband who is a creep. The story jumps around and we get different points of view that aren't necessary.

I can't recommend this book.

A peek into a woman feeling serious dissatisfaction with her marriage and life choices to include having children. If that isn't enough as is, her husband loses his job, she might be pregnant for a third time, and she is having weird body pains and has found a lump. When it rains, it pours. And for Cat, it's torrential.
The husband, Donovan, is a real jerk and deserved to be sacked. But hides this from his wife until she is already fighting with her own demons that she isn't sharing with him.
When Cat finally has her breakdown moment, she finds herself at her client's home (Cat designs websites) that of the rich local Matron of Yoga. The mantra of mind over manner, stretching, and healthy eating can prove fatal but it seems to be just what Cat wants, if not needs. She has left her family with barely a word.
First world problems are rampant in the Lump one of which is the treatment of domestic help. There is a side story of Cat and Donovan's housekeeper who has her own issues but is basically invisible.
Marketed as a dark comedy, I really couldn't find anything funny. It's ok to bring the jokes to the dark moments as a way of coping, but I didn't find the humor within the pages. The ending came abruptly and left quite a bit on the table.

Thank you to PW Grab-a-Galley for my copy via Netgalley. All opinions are mine.

This is not necessarily a book I would have kept reading had I picked it up at a bookstore. My first thought was that it was clever and flippant. But because it was an ARC I did keep reading. And it got deeper and more complicated and less clever and flippant.

To say I liked it isn’t really right, because the people in it aren’t terribly likable and the situation is definitely not likable. But it’s good. It’s about family, and illness, and the secrets people keep from the ones they love. The main characters make some very poor choices. It’s messy and sometimes gross and occasionally icky. With moments of grace and truth and beauty. Sometimes I t’s even funny.

Thank you Nathan Whitlock, Dundurn Press and NetGalley for allowing me to read this ARC e-book. As a mom you can have bad days but we all know there can be those snowball effect days where all day you are trying to put out fire and questioning how much more you can handle while also thinking running away seems to be the only escape.... Well in this dark, funny look into one mothers life that is exactly what she does. This book is told from multiple view points one even coming from an old dog. And honestly I felt so much in this book... solidarity fir one but every emotion possible and as a mother I really enjoyed it and even found myself laughing out loud.

The book could have been better. The characters were easy to understand but lacked depth and emotion. The ending was not satisfying and left room for more improvement.

It feels very unfinished, the characters were easy to follow but there was no true depth of heart. The whole entire book was wrapped up in one sentence at the end and it could have been so much more than that.