Save It for the Pod

Ove has been forced into retirement, is a few months a widower, and is convinced the modern world is staffed entirely by idiots. Then a new family moves in next door and backs a trailer into his mailbox. Full spoilers throughout, including the ending, plus a comparison with the Tom Hanks adaptation. Content note: suicide.

Alex and Lindsey get into Ove as a man with an enormous heart and a very small point of view, and what he actually learns: not a transformation, just the capacity to give a little. They work through Sonja as the colour in his black-and-white world, and the wish that he could have found some of it in himself. Plus the difference between being incompetent and simply never having been taught, and the habit of explaining a feeling away so you never have to feel it.

This book also sent Lindsey after a slow bathroom sink at ten at night. It did not go well.

Also: Parvaneh, a cat with better judgment than most of the humans, what A Man Called Otto changes, and a pre-emptive apology to Alex's dad.

Cry count and ratings at the end.

Natalie is a tradwife influencer with a farm called Yesteryear, an audience across America, and a hired staff quietly doing the work she's filmed doing. Then she wakes up with no electricity, no plumbing, and a husband and children who seem wrong. Full spoilers throughout, including the twist. Content note: child abuse and sexual assault.

Alex and Lindsey get into Natalie as a woman who refuses, over and over, to learn the one thing the book keeps trying to teach her, and they disagree about whether she ever actually believed the faith she used to justify it. They work through the cost of an ideology that tells you not to trust your own gut, the tradwife boom as a response to an economy that makes real choice expensive, and what patriarchy does to Caleb, a man who might have made a good kindergarten teacher if anyone had let him.

Plus whether Natalie deserves pity, why the ending is really the beginning of someone else's story, and a surprise phone call from Alex's dad; who has strong opinions despite not having read the book.

Cry count and ratings at the end.

Alicia Berenson shot her husband five times and has not spoken since. Theo Faber is the psychotherapist who takes a job at her secure unit specifically to treat her. Full spoilers throughout, including the twist. Content note: suicide.

Alex and Lindsey get into Theo as a narrator you're set up to trust and shouldn't, and the gap between being fluent in therapy language and having actually done the work. They track the chance his own therapist offers him to break the pattern, and what he does with it instead. Plus the book's central question, whether anyone is born evil or whether that's just a more comfortable story than admitting you made choices, and why Theo's answer changes by the end.

They also compare notes on when each of them clocked the twist, which turns out to be two different wrong theories arriving at roughly the right suspicion.

Also: how much sympathy Alicia deserves as the person all of this happened to, what the snow is doing at the end, and the difference between putting a coping mechanism down and quietly swapping it for another one.

Cry count and ratings at the end.

Clementine is twenty-nine, a book publicist in New York, six months into grieving the aunt who left her an apartment. The apartment occasionally deposits her seven years in the past, where a man is subletting for the summer. Full spoilers throughout. Content note: suicide.

Alex and Lindsey get into what the book argues about change: that loving someone means falling for them again as they become new people, and that refusing to let someone change is its own denial of the future. They work through the aunt as the cautionary version of the same story, a woman who kept moving so nothing could ever sour, and try to untangle whose timeline is ahead of whose, which turns out to be genuinely hard to hold in your head. Plus a defense of romance as a genre that does more with personal growth than it gets credit for.

Then it gets personal. Coming up on eight years married, they ask whether they'd date each other's seven-years-ago selves. Neither answer is yes.

Also: a pronunciation crisis over the male lead's name, two pigeons with an unprintable one, and the discovery that the book's cover matches this podcast's colors.

Cry count and ratings at the end.

Darrow has spent nine months in a box. Morning Star picks up there and closes out the Red Rising trilogy. Full spoilers throughout, including the ending, plus Hunger Games spoilers in the final segment.

Alex and Lindsey argue that this is actually Sevro's book rather than Darrow's, and trace him from imitating his father and Darrow to the moment he stops performing and does something real. They get into a death that lands far earlier than either of them was ready for, whether the Jackal was ever redeemable or simply committed to his own victimhood, and Darrow's late reckoning with who Eo actually was: brave, reckless, and gone before she had to live with what she started. Plus the compromises Darrow makes here that are harder to defend than anything he's done before.

Then the question the trilogy leaves open. Taking the throne turns out to be the easy part, and there are four more books about what comes next.

Also: a listener question comparing this to The Hunger Games, one meme that yanked someone clean out of the book, and the cover art making sense.

Cry count and ratings at the end.

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, seen on 70mm in a sold-out theater. Full spoilers throughout. Neither of them has read the poem all the way through, so this is about Nolan's retelling rather than Homer.

Alex and Lindsey get into the Trojan Horse as a violation of the one rule nobody broke, that a stranger at your door might be a god in disguise, and what happens to a society after that pact is gone. They make the case that this is a pointed follow-up to Oppenheimer, another story about a weapon that can't be un-invented, and argue about whether the modern equivalent is the phone in your pocket.

Also: Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson doing the thing Odysseus gets songs written about, and a theater that applauded at the end.

Cry count and ratings at the end.

An 86-year-old stranger arrives in the small Georgia town of Golden, buys all 92 pencil portraits hanging in a local coffee shop, and begins returning them to the people they depict. Full spoilers throughout.

Alex and Lindsey get into Theo's governing idea that to love someone is to be curious about them, what happens to a novel when its protagonist arrives already fully formed, and whether the book's explicitly Christian register is a barrier or beside the point. They also pick favorite bestowals (Tony the bookstore owner, and Kendrick) and talk about an ending they both braced for without guessing its shape.

A new cry count record, a dispute over whether choking up counts, and ratings at the end.

Golden Son (the second book in the Red Rising trilogy) opens with a time skip, a defeat, and Darrow's patron cutting him loose. Everything he built at the Institute is gone, and the Sons of Ares want him to become a terrorist. Full spoilers for Red Rising and Golden Son.

Alex and Lindsey get into Ragnar, and the scene where freedom is offered to him and he experiences it as an insult rather than a gift. They argue that changing sides costs him far more than it costs any Gold. They also work through Darrow's own prejudice against the Golds he holds at arm's length, whether Roque's betrayal was always coming or something Darrow caused, and Fitchner's claim about which color has to lead a rebellion for it to free everybody. Plus the irony that the Golds turn out to be the most aimless and pleasure-seeking of all the colors, in a system Augustus defends on the grounds that it prevents exactly that.

Then Darrow goes home, and his mother says something about Eo that neither of them expected to hear out loud. It's where both cry counts came from.

Also: a scoreboard on last book's predictions, including one theory that turns out to be spectacularly wrong, and two people with real complaints about the pacing who still want the next book.

Cry count and ratings at the end.

In spring 2020, Belle Burden's husband of twenty years announced without warning that he was leaving. This is her account of the years that followed: the divorce, the prenup she signed without pushing back, and the reconstruction of a marriage she thought was happy. Full spoilers throughout, and the show's first nonfiction pick.

Alex and Lindsey get into how reliable a narrator Belle is early on versus late, and whether she knew herself well enough at the time to judge whether her marriage was working. They dig into the prenup as the book's engine, the muscles she let atrophy at James's request, and the difference between a partner who promises to protect you and one who empowers you. Plus what drew these two together in the first place, and the question underneath the whole book: what separates loving someone from consuming them.

Also: the double standard in the responses to Belle's essay, what the divorce cost the children, and the strange experience of reading a divorce memoir that doubles as a window into how the one percent live.

Cry count and ratings at the end.

In 1714, Addie trades her soul for freedom and gets it on terms she didn't read closely enough: she cannot age, cannot be remembered by anyone she meets, and cannot leave a mark on the world. Three hundred years later, a man in a bookstore says he remembers her. Full spoilers throughout.

Alex and Lindsey get into whether being remembered by someone else is part of what makes you human, and whether Addie actually grows across three centuries or whether the curse makes growth impossible. They work through Henry's inverted curse, seen by everyone as whatever they need him to be and known by none of them, and make the case that his arc is the more satisfying one. Plus Luc as antagonist and suitor, the question of whether he loves her, and a distinction between two kinds of freedom that Addie only ever gets one of.

This one produced their first split verdict, and their first thumbs down. One of them ends up rating the two protagonists separately.

Also: the theories they had about where this was going, which they liked better than where it went, and an ancient orange cat in the horror section.

Cry count and ratings at the end.