Kate & Frida by Kim Fay

I adored Love & Saffron from Kim Fay, so when I saw she had a new book out, Kate & Frida, I immediately ordered it. 

As in Love & Saffron, this is an epistolary novel. Frida Rodriguez is an aspiring war journalist living in Paris in the 1990s. She writes to a Seattle bookstore hoping to find a book and begins a correspondence with Kate Fair, a bookseller with ambitions to become an author. What follows is a peek into their developing friendship, a reminder of just how awful even what I think of as the pleasant Bill Clinton 1990s was, and a lot of book talk.

There are some mean criticisms of this book on Goodreads. But I loved it. There are some hard bits - one of the characters is a war journalist - but since I'm in my leaning into cozy fiction phase of my reading life, I have to say that this book checked all the boxes for me. The characters were believable and showed growth, the historical references (when I had to write "historical fiction" under the category for this book on my spreadsheet, I almost wept since the 1990s hardly seems like "history," but here we are) made sense based on our characters, and there is a callback to Love & Saffron, which tickled me. 4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

Friends from school say I should do TV news because I have such a big personality but I think it's the words that will last. (page 13)

I think this is true. We don't really know who Shakespeare was, let alone what he looked or sounded like, but we do know the words. 

...there's an essence of the era of fountain pens about him. (page 57)

This made me laugh and read it out loud to my husband. Dr. BB definitely has the era of fountain pens about him. 

He thinks so much more than the average human being. I'm pretty much an average human being. (page 70)

This! This is my whole life. 

"...there's no shame in walking away from a war. There is more than one way to make a difference in the world." (page 129)

I thought this was powerful. We all do what we can do in this world. 

Sometimes I look up from a book a hours have passed, and I haven't thought about Bumpa once. He can't escape his situation. Am I a terrible person for escaping? (page 137)

This hit too hard for me right now. 

We owe it to people who are suffering to savor everything good and beautiful we have in our lives. Not that we should deny bad things or turn our backs on them. But if suffering is contagious, then why isn't joy? Which virus do we want to spread? We don't help someone who's miserable by being miserable - we only add to the world's misery. (page184)

Maybe this is too preachy? But maybe I needed to hear it. 

Things I looked up:

Martha Gellhorn (page 3) - Hemingway's third wife and an author in her own right. 

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively (page 3) - a 1987 Booker Prize winning novel which spans the time before, during and after World War II

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (page 19) - Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia is a travel book written by Dame Rebecca West, published in 1941 in two volumes. The book is over 1,100 pages in modern editions and gives an account of Balkan history and ethnography during West's six-week trip to Yugoslavia in 1937.

aebleskiver (page 30) - spherical Danish snacks made from fried batter

Pinky Tuscadero (page 50) - the name of the character on Happy Days who was Fonz's girlfriend

Czeslaw Milosz (page 75) - a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. He primarily wrote his poetry in Polish. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Zabranjeno Pusenje (page 116) - a Bosnian rock band formed in Sarajevo in 1980. The group's musical style primarily consists of a distinctive garage rock sound with folk influences, often featuring innovative production and complex storytelling.

Nasiha Kapidzic- Hadzic (page 116) - a Bosnian children's author and poet. Her first children's book, Maskenbal u šumi, was published in 1962. She has won awards for her works, and after death her house was declared a national monument, she was memorialized as a stamp. 

The Shipping News (page 187) - a 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by American author E. Annie Proulx  

Melanie Rae Thon (page 207) - an American fiction writer known for work that moves beyond and between genres, exploring diversity, permeability, and interdependence from a multitude of human and more-than-human perspectives

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

I pretended to tip a hat...(page 43)

We saw the Tiny Hat Orchestra at the Backstage after dinner one night...(page 61)

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What are your feelings on epistolary novels? Do you have fond memories of the 1990s or are you happy to be in 2025?