Maiden, Mother, Space Crone

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favourite fiction writers of all time, but I was bitterly disappointed by Space Crone, a collection of some of her short non-fiction that is also bookended by two short stories. I think the editing was a problem here: frankly, this collection includes a lot of pieces that were clearly important and necessary when published but now don’t seem to be speaking to the zeitgeist. I wouldn’t complain about this if this was one of the collections Le Guin herself collected and published in her lifetime, but this was newly curated by So Mayer and Sarah Shin for Silver Press in 2023. Frankly, I was suspicious as soon as I read Mayer and Shin’s introduction, which felt old-fashionedly feminist in a bad way. The absolute least interesting thing about A Wizard of Earthsea and The Dispossessed is that they have male protagonists, especially as Ged and Shevek are deliberately written in opposition to the traditional heroic narrative, and yet we’re still told that it was an important change in Le Guin’s writing when she started centring women.

I also felt that selecting essays like ‘The Fisherwoman’s Daughter’ was a strange choice in 2023. When Le Guin wrote the essay back in 1988, she rightly challenged the then-prevalent idea that women can have ‘books or babies’ but not both, arguing that she herself was both a writer and a mother. But nowadays, after an absolute flood of literature on motherhood, both fiction and non-fiction, it can sometimes feel like things have swung the other way, that women are told that they have to become mothers to really tap into their creative powers. Absolutely fine if a woman feels, herself, that becoming a mother has made her a better writer – but I’ve also seen this claim carelessly generalised. When Le Guin quotes a passage on ‘the advantage of motherhood for a woman artist’, this was a vital corrective in 1988, but feels tone-deaf in 2023. (And where are the essays by men claiming that fatherhood has made them more intuitive artists?)

There are also parts of this essay I disagree with even when read in its historical context: Le Guin gives the impression that childless women have been accepted as artists but mothers have been excluded, but doesn’t seem to get the point that being a childless woman is not the same as being a man, and that women without children have been judged as freaks just as mothers have been judged as non-creative. When she writes, ‘motherhood, for any woman I know, simply means that she does everything everybody does plus bringing up the kids’, I was hugely frustrated. Le Guin’s positive intention here is clearly to say that being a mother doesn’t mean you can’t also be anything else you want, and I absolutely agree! But it devalues the hard, creative work of motherhood to suggest it takes up no space at all in somebody’s life, and it devalues the lives of women without children to suggest that they’re exactly the same as mothers’ lives with the motherhood bit missing. We have to accept that some women do choose not to have children to make more space in their life for other things, just as some people might choose not to go travelling, or not to have a demanding job, or not to make art.

The other pieces selected for this anthology confirmed my sense that it may be the editing that’s a problem here. Le Guin wrote so many wonderful, thoughtful, intelligent short stories, but ‘Sur’ (1982) is not one of them. It’s basically about a group of women explorers who go to the Antarctic and get to the South Pole before Roald Amundsen. Great! Go women! Why? The essay ‘Award and Gender’ (1999) makes important points about the gender biases of literary awards in 1999, but it’s now obviously out of date. Nicola Griffith has done good work on this more recently which shows that the problem has changed since Le Guin wrote: women are winning more awards, but only when they write about men. I also hated the titular essay ‘Space Crone’ (1976), which I think wants to valorise ‘ordinary’ women but just ends up feeling anti-intellectual. Other pieces are absolutely fine but feel like they are stating the obvious in this day and age, such as ‘Is Gender Necessary?’ (written in 1976, revised 1988 – the revisions are largely immaterial and the way they’re presented here makes it really difficult to read the text) and ‘On Genetic Determinism’ (2003).

I now can’t decide whether this was an especially badly edited anthology and I should risk seeking out more of Le Guin’s non-fiction, or whether I should cut my losses and stick to her fiction – especially as I found some of these pieces actively upsetting. Have you read any of Le Guin’s non-fiction? What did you think?

Quiet as it’s kept: The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis’s second novel, The Unsettled, from my 2024 reading list, explores how poor Black people can build community in a white supremacist, capitalist United States that treats them with consistent hostility. The novel presents us with three different communities. It starts when Ava and her eleven-year-old son, Toussaint, find themselves homeless in Philadelphia in 1985 after Ava flees an abusive marriage, and are forced to enter a shelter in Glenn Avenue. The Glenn Avenue shelter functions as a distorted version of actual collective co-operation: it’s meant to support mothers and children, but instead polices them, threatening them with eviction if they don’t meet its rules. When Ava’s ex-lover and Toussaint’s father, Cass, re-emerges, he promises them a different kind of life: a former Black Panther, he’s founding a commune which will also function as a neighbourhood health clinic and food bank. But Cass, too, is corrupted, happy to seize others’ property in the name of the cause, and to enforce his own beliefs on others through brutal punishment. The third community serves as a contrast to these two punitive places: it’s a Black-owned town, Bonaparte, in Alabama, which once was a centre of true communal living but is now in decay, with only four elderly residents left, including Dutchess, Ava’s mother.

The Unsettled alternates between sections set in Philadelphia and narrated in third-person by Ava, Touissant and a sequence of other characters, and sections set in Bonaparte and narrated in first-person by Dutchess. For me, it was in Bonaparte that this novel was at its most powerful, although roach-infested Glenn Avenue is also vivid. Mathis’s poetic prose deliberately recalls Toni Morrison’s earlier novels (e.g. the repeated phrase ‘quiet as it’s kept’) as she depicts the history of this once-enslaved Black community and how it continues in the present:

Bonaparte is how the white people called this place on the banks of the Alabama River… The earth turned on them (told you they was cursed) and sent plagues of insects… First master drowned, washed up covered with leeches. Second master, smallpox. Third, tuberculosis. Fourth master’s three sons all died on the same full-moon night. Shiiiit. The spirits don’t play. Our mothers neither. Massa so shook up he came down to the cabins… Three weeks later he was dead too. Heartbreak, you reckon. After that there was a lull in masters.

But the rest of The Unsettled drifts, seeming endless even though it’s barely over three hundred pages: I both recognised that it had important things to say while having to admit that I rarely felt engaged with it. I honestly don’t know why this didn’t work as fiction, at least for me; it feels like it should! The three generations of this family are all complex protagonists, even Toussaint, which is important, as children are often just placeholders in multi-generational stories to express the fears and hopes of adults. Cass abuses power but has also done some good. This should be absorbing! My only reflection is that the sections set outside Bonaparte and Glenn Avenue felt directionless compared to the sharp bite of Mathis’s critique of welfare or the mythology of the Black-owned town. They were much less distinctive, and so as the focus shifts towards the outside world after the midpoint, I found this increasingly generic. After the advance praise from Marilynne Robinson and Jesmyn Ward, I’d expected more consistent originality.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

Have you ever read a novel that you didn’t click with but found it hard to explain why?

April Superlatives, 2024

A shorter one this month as I’ve reviewed a lot of my ARCs, Women’s Prize and Carol Shields Prize reading already. I was also over on Kim’s blog yesterday talking about some of my favourite books for Triple Choice Tuesday!

With my historian hat on, I contributed to BBC Radio 4’s Antisocial on ‘Are “kidults'” a problem?’ last Friday: you can hear it here [I’m on from about 42 minutes in] or it will be on the radio again tonight at 8pm!

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… One Girl Began by Kate Murray-Browne. If March was a brilliant reading month, April has been a bit of a dud. I read a couple books that I admired but did not love, and a lot that were just meh. So what a delight to race through this at the very end of the month. One Girl Began tells the stories of three generations of women in Hackney linked to the same building and struggling with the limitations placed on women’s lives. Ellen works in a box factory in 1909 that becomes a squat in 1984, when Frances moves in, and a gentrified flat in 2019, when Amanda has her first baby. Murray-Browne’s writing is as clear, immersive and beautiful as it was in her debut, The Upstairs Room, and this lifts material that might otherwise be both familiar and grim. Highly, highly recommended. My full (and very long!) review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez. Talk about paint-by-numbers histfic… I was attracted to Henríquez’s third novel because it promised a panoramic look at the building of the Panama Canal in the early twentieth century, skipping between the viewpoints of labourers, fishermen, local activists, a teenage girl from Barbados drawn to Panama in hope of good wages, and a doctor who is trying to eliminate malaria on the isthmus. But The Great Divide actually has precious little to say about the Panama Canal, preferring instead to give us a series of stock characters: the frail, silenced white middle-class wife, the ‘bold’ black girl who is trying to make a better life for her family, the grumpy Panamanian fisherman who wants to defend the way things have always been done, the brutal US overseer who believes in the march of progress. Because most of the novel switches between many different sets of people, almost none of which have anything interesting about them (there’s perhaps some potential in the doctor, John Oswald, and the fisherman, Francisco), it feels flat and slow; I love character-led fiction, but it does require… characters.

There’s also almost no sense of place, which surely should have been crucial here. It was instructive to compare The Great Divide, which is set in 1907, with Murray-Browne’s vivid handling of the 1909 section in One Girl Began; after one chapter spent in Ellen’s world, I felt I knew it better, because of Murray-Browne’s careful attention to telling historical detail, and how she maps out Ellen’s individual life trajectory rather than allowing her to be a working-class factory-girl stereotype. Compare these two passages about a busy street:

[The Great Divide]: ‘Carriages led by horses clapped down the road, and carts led by mules in turn led by men rattled and clanked. Women walked about carrying baskets on their backs or their heads or in the crooks of their arms. Well-attired people stood on street corners and talked. Every building looked clean and brand new’.

[One Girl Began]: ‘It was already livelier than it had ever been in our old neighbourhood. A group of girls about ten or eleven were dancing barefoot around a pile of their boots and a pram with a baby in it. Young men, who looked like the kind who worked below us in the factory, sauntered past with beer bottles, in checked trousers and brightly coloured ties.’

Anyway: thanks to Henríquez for reminding me why I rarely read straightforward histfic. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Best Horror Novel I Read This Month Was…

… From Below by Darcy Coates. A crew of divers descend to film the wreck of the steamship Arcadia, which has rested on the ocean floor for more than eighty years. Shortly before it sank, a panicked radio message was received by a nearby ship: ‘They’re in the walls’. At first, our protagonists mostly fear the innate dangers of diving so deep: the immense pressure on the body, causing nitrogen to dissolve into your tissues, the limited oxygen, the risk of losing your way amid sheets of silt. But gradually, they realise that something is waking inside the sunken ship… This is another genre novel, like Noelle W. Ihli’s psychological thriller, Run on Red, and Arthur C. Clarke’s classic piece of science fiction, Earthlight, that Just Delivers. I love space horror and underwater horror, but too often the characters are stupid, there is too much time wasted on complicated backstories, and the plots are convoluted at best and illogical at worst. Coates knows what she’s doing. From Below is a delightful slow-burn that is, frankly, properly terrifying. And yes, while our protagonists don’t always act in their own best interests, their actions make sense, and the story behind the ship and why it has chosen now to awake is clever, but not too much so – I always feel that horror should leave a certain amount unexplained. Not as original nor as creative as Mira Grant’s Into the Drowning Deep or Caitlin Starling’s The Luminous Dead, but much more satisfying than the latter.

The Best Sequel I Read This Month Was…

… Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler. I’m a big Butler fan but I was seriously frustrated by Parable of the Sower. Set in a dystopian, near-future United States, it follows Black teenager Lauren as she develops a new belief system she names ‘Earthseed’, and leads a disparate group of people to found their own community. Ultimately, I found Lauren’s founding narrative unbelievable, and she came across as disturbingly monomaniacal and even deluded; the diary entry format was also limiting. Parable of the Talents is, in many ways, a straight follow-up to Parable of the Sower but is a much stronger novel. The majority of the book is still made up of Lauren’s diary entries, but we now see her a few years on as the leader of an established Earthseed community, Acorn, based on collective work and faith in Earthseed’s central tenet, ‘God Is Change’. If we gloss over how she got there, Lauren’s mission now makes sense, and I liked Butler’s portrayal of this fragile but working society. In contrast to Parable of the Sower, as well, Lauren’s diary entries are now framed by critical commentary from her daughter Asha, which made me much more sympathetic to Lauren. I wish I’d read Parable of the Talents before Parable of the Sower, as I think I’d now be more convinced by that one too. Absorbing, brutal and wise, like all Butler’s work.

What books stood out to you this month? Are you tempted (or turned off by) any of my April reads?

Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2024: 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster, Enter Ghost, & My Shortlist Thoughts!

The Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist will be announced today, Wednesday 24th April, at 8am – so I’m squeezing in a couple more longlist reviews just in time!

I was attracted to 8 Lives of A Century-Old Trickster, Mirinae Lee’s debut novel, by its blurb: an elderly woman, Ms Mook, who is living in a nursing home in the demilitarised zone separating North and South Korea, tells the stories of her eight unbelievable lives. It turns out, as other reviewers have noted, that this novel has been patched together from five previously published short stories, with two others, plus this framing narrative, added to pull it together. Unfortunately, I could really see the traces of these stories’ origins, which made 8 Lives feel repetitive and unsatisfying, despite some strong sections. We hear about the ‘comfort women’ forced into working in a Japanese brothel in Indonesia during the Second World War; a child who poisons her abusive father in North Korea in the 1930s; and a young North Korean woman who flees to China post-war and seeks help from an American pastor. The stand-out for me was ‘Me, Myself and Mole’, set in 1955: a North Korean man’s wife returns after the war, having been kidnapped by Japanese soldiers, but he slowly realises that she is not who she seems to be. This sets up a wider theme of double lives and deception that runs throughout the novel. But you can still see the joins. Later stories spell out too clearly what happened in earlier stories, and Lee ultimately tells us how all these stories fit together, even though it was pretty obvious to me by the midpoint. (The chronology, however, is still off: Ms Mook claims to be nearly a hundred years old but this doesn’t seem to line up, particularly with her adopted daughter’s timeline; trouble is, Lee doesn’t handle this confidently enough to make it clear whether this is another of Ms Mook’s fantasies or fuzzy maths.) This isn’t a bad novel, but I don’t think it belongs on prize lists.

I’m still halfway through Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, so this won’t be a full review, but it stands out to me as one of the stronger entries on the longlist. Sonia is a Dutch-Palestinian actor who grew up in London; in her late thirties, after the end of a love affair, she goes to visit her older sister Haneen in Haifa. Despite Sonia’s initial resistance, she finds herself being cast in a production of Hamlet in the West Bank, directed by Mariam, whose brother is a politician under baseless investigation from the Israeli authorities. Hammed handles the intricacies of Sonia’s family beautifully, teasing apart several layers of guilt and displacement. How do Palestinians with Israeli passports who live within ‘ ’48’ – the Palestinian land taken in 1948 that ‘is today considered to comprise the modern state of Israel’ – relate to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? How can Sonia, with her British passport, claim to belong even in  ’48, despite having spent all her childhood summers in Haifa? But is Haneen, who controversially teaches at an Israeli university, any less of an outsider? I’m particularly appreciating both the taped and spoken scenes that are written as play scripts, inviting the reader to consider the true weight of what each character is saying. And this is, of course, a horribly timely book in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. But so far, Enter Ghost strikes me as a novel that’s almost too carefully crafted. Its themes are not clunky but they are very mappable: it would be easy to write an essay on how Sonia is the ghost re-entering her ‘home’ land where she plays a mother despite unwillingly being childless in a play that is about a police state etc etc. I haven’t yet emotionally connected with her or with the other characters, so I feel, at the moment, as if this is one to admire, and to learn from, rather than to love.

Having only read six books from the longlist, I won’t be making any predictions this year, but here are my rankings of the ones I have read, with links to my other reviews.

1. Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan
2. Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
3. The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord
4. 8 Lives of A Century-Old Trickster by Mirinae Lee
5. In Defence of the Act by Effie Black
6. River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure

Overall, my reading has confirmed my first impression: this list is very meh. I was underwhelmed by most of what I read, and I haven’t even touched the longlisted novels that didn’t immediately appeal to me. Given that a lot of the picks I’ve read are obviously judges’ wild card choices (Lord, Black, potentially Lee), I doubt many of these will be shortlisted, and therefore doubt that I’ll have the energy to read another 4-5 books from this list.

On the flip side, the only ones I can muster up any enthusiasm for seeing on the shortlist are Brotherless Night and maybe Enter Ghost – neither of which I totally loved.

And the Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist 2024 is….

OK, so this is totally unverifiable… but I was just saying to my friend that Hammad, Ganeshananthan, Kilroy and Enright surely have a good shot, and the other two are wild cards… and that’s what we’ve got. Given the longlist, I don’t hate this. Obviously we all know my thoughts on the Lescure, so I’d have swapped that one out, but otherwise, this looks like the best of a bad bunch.

I’ve read three already, of course, and I will now probably read the Kilroy, but I don’t think I’ll bother to read the whole list. Neither Grenville nor Enright have lit my heart on fire in the past.

What are your thoughts on the Women’s Prize Shortlist 2024?

The Carol Shields Prize, 2024, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2024: Dances, The Blue, Beautiful World & In Defence of the Act

I’m belatedly trying to read a few more of the titles that appealed to me from the Women’s Prize longlist before the shortlist announcement on 24th April, while finishing up my last Carol Shields Prize longlist review!

Carol Shields Longlist

Dances, which follows Cece, a young Black woman who becomes the first Black female principal at the New York City Ballet, is one of several novels on the Carol Shields Prize longlist that foreground a sister’s painful relationship with her rebellious, frequently absent brother/s (the other two are Brotherless Night and Between Two Moons). In Cece’s case, her older brother Paul, a talented visual artist, is the centre of her emotional world: he provided the encouragement and, initially, the financial backing for her to study ballet when her mother believed it to be a waste of time because of the innate racism of dance companies. But when the novel opens, he’s been missing for five years after becoming a drug addict. Now all Cece has left is her art.

The ballet books I devoured as a child always featured young white girls who were innately gifted and sailed relatively effortlessly to the top; in contrast, contemporary ballet books aimed at adults, with the very honourable exception of Meg Howrey’s The Cranes Dance, tend to play into Ambitious Women Meet Bad Ends, starring white women who invariably give up ballet because it is toxic and bad for them. Dances is a refreshing counter-balance. Nicole Cuffy explores Cece’s difficult relationship with ballet, her body, and the societal oppression she faces as a Black woman, but also lets her continue to love to dance. As Cece reflects, the relationship between her and ballet is fundamentally different because she is Black: ‘I was always so adamant about classical ballet. Not contemporary. Not jazz. A rebellion. An insistence that Black women can be ethereal too. That we don’t always have to be drawn in bold lines. Paul never drew me in bold lines. Always thin, intricate strokes, a precise kind of chaos’.  This is in some ways, a conventional novel, but it’s also quietly moving.

In my overall ranking of the longlist, I’d place this one sixth, below Brotherless Night but above Between Two Moons. I read it as a buddy read with Bookish Beck.

Thanks so much to Nicole Magas at Zgstories  for sourcing a free copy of this book from the publisher for me.

I’m not aiming to read the full Carol Shields Prize longlist this year, but I’ve selected nine titles that I do want to read. This is number nine. I’ve already read Birnam Wood, I Have Some Questions for You, Land of Milk and Honey, Loot, Brotherless Night, The Future, A Council of Dolls and Between Two Moons.

Women’s Prize Longlist

The Women’s Prize has shunned SF for much of its recent history. I think the last SF novel to be longlisted was Becky Chambers’s The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet back in 2014. So it’s absolutely typical that when the Prize finally nominates SF again, it’s a totally left-field choice – which is not to say that Karen Lord’s The Blue, Beautiful World is bad. Lord’s complex book, the third in a trilogy, is set on an Earth where it gradually dawns on both the reader and the characters that alien humanoid civilisations of different kinds are already among us. Many use virtual face technology to blend in, wearing a series of electronic masks, but there are also conscious spaceships, ‘intelligent leviathans’, that have infiltrated Earth’s oceans. Lord is interested both in how different alien factions try to manage the incorporation of Earth into a wider galactic civilisation and how humans themselves react to this. One major plot-line, therefore, focuses on Owen, a pop megastar who is actually from Alpha Pisces Austrini and is using his wealth and influence to manipulate people and corporations on Earth. Another focuses on a group of young people from across the globe who have been chosen to take part in what they think is a theoretical exercise in global diplomacy in a first contact scenario, but, it turns out, is actually all too real.

When Lord stays put on Earth, this book is original, thought-provoking and subtle, a bit reminiscent of Malka Older’s Infomocracy. Unfortunately, the brief glimpses we get of the alien civilisations outside Earth’s limits make them feel much more cartoonish, even though it’s clear they’ve been developed over the course of the first two books of this trilogy. The Romanesque names, the overblown pronouncements, the paint-by-numbers politics… perhaps this would have felt deeper had I read the first two, but I somehow doubt it. On a more meta level, I do wish the Women’s Prize hadn’t gone for this one, because it is exactly the sort of SF novel that will put off non-SF readers, and I just don’t think it’s a great fit for the Prize. So many other options… Nina Allan, Grace Curtis, Emily Tesh, or indeed the one I’d have picked, Naomi Alderman. Sigh. But SF fans, Lord is worth reading.

To be honest, I’m a bit upset. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that went so wrong, so quickly, after the three-quarters mark. What happened? Did Effie Black get scared off by her own daring? Did someone steal her MS, a la Yellowface, and quickly scribble out the most conventional ending they could think of given what had come before? So many questions.

In Defence of the Act is meant to be about an evolutionary psychobiologist, Jessica, exploring the ethics of suicide; her own childhood trauma leads her to secretly believe that there can be times when killing yourself is the right thing to do. After all, if her abusive dad had succeeded when he first attempted suicide, both she and her two siblings might be considerably less screwed up. Jessica’s research focuses on species of spiders where certain individuals kill themselves to ensure the furtherance of either their genes or those of their close relatives, so in this context, suicide can make sense from an evolutionary perspective. In Jessica’s own life, she follows the same rule, but flipped: she breaks up with girlfriend Jamie because she doesn’t believe she can ever have children because of the fear of becoming her father, but Jamie ought to fulfil her desire of becoming a mother: ‘because the world needs more people like her’.

Trouble is, the last quarter or so of this novel tosses all of these difficult questions out the window. It’s impossible to fully discuss the problems with this novel without spoilers, so, if needed, my spoiler-tagged review is on Goodreads.

PS I love a small publisher, but my god have époque press burdened In Defence of the Act with a hideous, early-00s YA-ish cover and an even worse turn-of-the-millennium ‘computer’ font inside [second photo]. Seriously, we’re almost in this kind of territory.

Are you tempted by anything from the Carol Shields or Women’s Prize longlists?

I’m Still Reading ARCs for the Spring: Lyon, Tchaikovsky, Tudor, Nicholls

In which I continue to reflect on the consequences of requesting too enthusiastically from NetGalley. We have a nice range of genres here: litfic, SF, horror/crime, and contemporary romance.

I’ve never forgotten Rachel Lyon’s Self-Portrait With Boy, not only because of its arresting premise but because of the way it interrogates the costs of being an artist. Her second litfic novel, Fruit of the Dead, is beautifully-written, richly atmospheric, with an irresistible sense of folktale logic – but it just doesn’t have anything nearly as interesting to say. A loose retelling of the myth of Persephone and Demeter, Fruit of the Dead is narrated in turn by teenage Cory, who goes to work as a babysitter on a private island owned by a pharmaceutical billionaire, and her mother Emer, who is terrified when her daughter disappears for a summer without telling her where she’s going. Lyon puts both Cory and Emer on the page so confidently: there’s a real sense of them occupying physical space. In contrast, the rest of the cast fade away into sketches, even the Hades-like billionaire himself. And while the logic of the original myth gives this story its driving force, Lyon also yields to the temptation to include details that add little to the purpose of her book but are ironic references-back, like Emer leading an agricultural NGO that has sold a load of genetically-modified ‘magic rice’ to China that fails to grow. Lyon is one of those writers who could write the phone book and make it compelling, but I wish there had been more to this.

Alien Clay, a standalone SF novel from the prolific Adrian Tchaikovsky, is set on the exoplanet of Kiln, a place of burgeoning, abundant alien life but no obviously intelligent species. Humans are determined to find out who built the mysterious structures on the surface of the planet, complete with a series of hieroglyphs that seem to signify an unknown language. However, under the Mandate, free scientific investigation is forbidden: it’s a totalitarian government that pushes an anthropocentric view of the world and is challenged by any suggestion of sentient aliens (interestingly, this is the second SF novel published in March 2024 that uses this human-centric premise; the other one is Grace Curtis’s Floating Hotel). So far, so good: I loved the fascinating horrors of Kiln and, although the solution to the central question about the planet is pretty obvious, I looked forward to watching how it would unfold. But that narrator! The protagonist, Arton Daghdev, is a xenobiologist exiled to a labour camp on Kiln for his dissident views. Life at the camp is brutal, and Daghdev clearly deals with it through humour. Unfortunately, while I didn’t dislike Daghdev as a character, I found his defence mechanisms incredibly jarring; we can never engage with the seriousness of what’s really going on, because he’s always in the way. I felt like I was reading a weird cross between Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society. I think Tchaikovsky has two modes as a writer: properly serious SF, like the impressive Children of Time trilogy, and this more lighthearted register. Readers who liked his And Put Away Childish Things, for example, are likely to get on much better with this one.

I very much enjoyed thriller writer CJ Tudor’s turn to schlocky horror in The Drift, and so I was eager to pick up her follow-up, The Gathering. Definite shades of Stephen King here: The Gathering is set in a world where the existence of ‘vampyr’ colonies is acknowledged and feared, but where laws govern the ways that humans are allowed to interact with them. Culls of colonies can be authorised if they prey on humans, but otherwise locals are expected to leave them alone. Our protagonist, Barbara, is a no-nonsense detective who is, refreshingly, an older lesbian: she travels to a small town in Alaska where a teenage boy has been found with his throat ripped out. Given the town’s history of mysterious killings, its inhabitants are keen for Barbara to call for a cull of the nearby vampyrs. But is there more going on here than meets the eye? Sadly, I’d say this is more of a crime novel with a touch of horror than an actual horror novel, and so will appeal more to crime fiction fans. While The Gathering starts well, as Barbara adjusts to the freezing weather and her run-down motel, it swiftly loses much sense of place. I was also frustrated by the lack of worldbuilding – Tudor relies very heavily on existing vampire lore and barely explains her rules (frankly, the lifecycles and biology of vampires are better developed in LJ Smith’s Night World series, which is YA from the 90s, and so has the pace and page count you’d expect). Barbara is supposedly an expert on vampyr anthropology, but there’s little sense of what that means, as the vampyrs could be replaced by an outcast human community in this novel with little knock-on effect. I got lost in the cast and felt that the climax was merely set-up for what looks likely to be a continuing series, with a number of significant loose ends left trailing. Love vampires, but I won’t be reading on.

And finally for the contemporary romance, a genre that I never typically read, so, pinch of salt. When I picked up David Nicholls’ iconic One Day in 2009 (yes bought the hardback, I am so ahead of the game), I was exactly the same age as Emma is at the start of the novel. Now I’m just a year younger than Marnie, the late-thirties female protagonist of Nicholls’ latest, You Are Here. Marnie meets Michael, a geography teacher, as they embark on a long group holiday, aiming to walk across the country from the Lakes to the Pennines to the Dales to the Moors. Marnie is not a fan of the outdoors; Michael is full of interesting facts about the landscape. A typical Nicholls romance ensues, heavy on the banter, defensiveness and the slow reveal of vulnerability.

My favourite Nicholls novel is not One Day but Us – I adored its dark comedy, its petty tragedy – so I suspect I’ll be in the minority here when I say that I was sorry to see Nicholls returning to familiar territory. I was also deeply, deeply frustrated by Marnie, her unfunny quips (seriously, she reminded me of Ian from One Day at times, except that I like Ian more), her self-centredness, her narrow-mindedness, the way she’s limited herself for no good reason. Because I really warmed to Michael, this made my reading experience weirdly jarring; I very much enjoyed Michael’s sections, and even started to like Marnie more when we see her through his eyes, but then remembered every time we return to her point-of-view that she’s incredibly annoying. Both protagonists also feel dated. Part of the bite of One Day, as showcased in the superb recent Netflix series, is Nicholls’ attention to the precise detail of being 22 in 1988, or 37 in 2003. But these characters are not his generation, but mine, and I kept on thinking the book was set at least ten years ago; they just don’t feel like millennials to me, although it’s hard to put my finger on why. Any one detail – the books Marnie checks out of the library as a child, for example – can be explained away, so I imagine it’s the subtle accumulation of these kind of things that’s throwing me off. Anyway. One Day fans will love this, but for me, it ranks somewhere below both Us and Sweet Sorrow.

You Are Here is out in the UK on 23rd April.

I received free proof copies of all these novels from the publishers for review.

The Carol Shields Prize, 2024: Between Two Moons, & My Shortlist Wishlist!

Aisha Abdel Gawad’s debut novel, Between Two Moons, is set during Ramadan in the Arab-American Muslim community of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which suffers under the weight of heavy surveillance, suspicion and Islamophobia. It’s told almost entirely from the perspective of teenage, Egyptian-American hijabi Amira, who has just graduated from high school and is figuring out what to do with the rest of her life; as ever, her twin sister, Lina, is the rebellious one, off drinking and having sex while Amira covers for her. The sisters’ world is rocked when their older brother Sami is released from prison after six years, which turns their family dynamic upside down. Meanwhile, a raid on a local business foreshadows more racial violence directed at their community.

There’s much to like about Gawad’s writing. Her prose is clear, fluid and readable. Between Two Moons is a loving portrait of a very particular world, and her depiction of the twins and their family shines: no flat stereotypes here, despite the familiar set-up. I appreciated the way she explores how Amira realistically negotiates her own identity, neither rejecting her heritage nor simply accepting tradition. For me, though, this felt like a YA coming-of-age novel that I’d read many times before, with predictable narrative beats (despite a quiet, satisfying twist near the end): sexual experimentation with dodgy men, alcohol, prejudice, social media drama, tensions with parents. It’s certainly a great example of this particular sub-genre, but nothing about it especially stood out. Although other members of Amira’s community occasionally narrate brief interludes in the text, I’d have loved this to be a more polyphonic novel rather than focusing on the point of view of a single teenager. I’m keen to read whatever Gawad writes next, though.

Thanks so much to Nicole Magas at Zgstories  for sourcing a free copy of this book from the publisher for me.

I’m not aiming to read the full Carol Shields Prize longlist this year, but I’ve selected nine titles that I do want to read. This is number eight. 

*   *  *

The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction 2024 shortlist will be announced tomorrow, April 9th! I haven’t yet managed to read all the titles from the longlist that I wanted to read (as well as Dances, I now fancy Chrysalis after reading Rebecca’s review), but what would I like to see shortlisted right now? Here’s my current ranking, with links to my other reviews:

1. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

2. I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

3. The Future by Catherine Leroux trans. Susan Ouriou

4. Land of Milk And Honey by C. Pam Zhang

5. Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan

6. Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad

7. A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power

8. Loot (DNF) by Tania James

This means that my ideal shortlist is:

Version 1.0.0

I’m not going to try making predictions for the shortlist, as unlike the Women’s Prize, I just have no sense of what the judges will choose! My only assumption is that at least one collection of short stories will make the list – so my top five have basically zero chance of being the actual top five 🙂

What would you like to see on the shortlist? See Rebecca’s round-up post and Marcie’s round-up post as well.

EDIT 10/4/24: The actual shortlist is here!

I’m very pleased to see Brotherless Night and (especially) Birnam Wood here, but underwhelmed by the other picks: all focus on turbulent family relationships and intergenerational stories, which don’t especially appeal to me. The longlist was so diverse that it’s a great shame to have ended up with a shortlist that feels samey, and I’m very surprised to see no short stories.

Do any of these shortlisted titles appeal to you?

The Carol Shields Prize, 2024: A Council of Dolls

Winona… survived the end of one world and is learning what it’s like to live in another. 

A small Dakhóta girl is growing up in Chicago in the late 1960s with her volatile mother Lillian and kind but passive father, who tellingly remains unnamed for much of the narrative. Lillian, a committed community activist, is carrying a burden of trauma: she cannot bear to be touched on most of her body, sometimes takes to her bed for days on end, and explodes in violent outbursts aimed at her daughter. A Council of Dolls, Mona Susan Power’s latest novel, traces Lillian’s history through the violent Indian Boarding Schools in North Dakota to the death of Lakota leader Sitting Bull in 1890, when Lillian’s own mother, Cora, was only a baby. The novel proceeds backwards in time until its final section, which sees Lillian’s daughter, now called Jesse, coming to terms with her own CPTSD in the present day. The stories of these three generations – Cora, Lillian and Jesse – are witnessed and related by the dolls they carried, which sometimes seem to have their own power to affect events.

In her afterword to this novel, Power writes that ‘Writing this book was a healing endeavour. May it support the healing of others’, and this New York Times article delves further, demonstrating how far Power draws on her own experiences and those of her maternal ancestors. The section narrated by Jesse makes it especially obvious that this is a work of testimony, which is hugely important historically but doesn’t always make for very good fiction: fiction is ultimately not about simply ‘giving voice’ to the oppressed, because it can’t.* I’ve definitely read writers who are able to tap into their own trauma and translate it into art, as Elissa Washuta does in her brilliant essay collection White Magic and Jessica Johns does in her chilling horror novel Bad Cree. And A Council of Dolls is often genuinely moving in its descriptions of the horrors of the boarding schools and the ways in which Jesse tries to unpick her relationships with her parents alongside her Osage friend Izzy. Power manages to both recognise the impact of ‘dangerous’ parents like Lillian and Lillian’s own father, Jack, while showing how these characters have their own painful histories. But it also undermines itself through the clunkiness of the dialogue in these present-day scenes, and in how it finally spells out everything the reader needs to know.

The role of the dolls also plays out unevenly throughout this novel. Winona, the oldest of the three dolls, who came to Cora after surviving a massacre, has the most resonance in the narrative: their relationship is beautifully-written, and Winona’s burden of inherited pain effectively shows how this is also carried forward through human generations. She is burnt and remade, continuing through her living stone heart, which cleverly echoes the wider experiences of Indigenous peoples. The other two dolls feel less significant, and their relationships with their respective owners sometimes verge into the sentimental, especially in the cliched, faux-naive narration from child-Jesse at the start of the novel. Narration from some of the dolls also becomes repetitive near the end, as they tell Jesse things we already know – although, on the other hand, I very much liked how Power leaves deliberate gaps and silences in her narrative, such as the jump from Jack and Cora at boarding school to their later, abusive marriage.

I can see why this is on the Carol Shields longlist, and I admired it in many ways – but given the strength of the other contenders, I don’t think it will make my personal shortlist.

*See also Namwali Serpell and Parul Sehgal on issues of empathy and trauma in fiction.

I read this as a buddy read with Bookish Beck. Rebecca’s review is here. Thanks so much to Nicole Magas at Zgstories for sourcing a free e-ARC from the publisher for me.

I’m not aiming to read the full Carol Shields Prize longlist this year, but I’ve selected nine titles that I do want to read. This is number seven. I’ve already read Birnam Wood, I Have Some Questions for You, Land of Milk and Honey, Loot, Brotherless Night and The Future.

March Superlatives, 2024

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Boy Parts by Eliza Clark. This debut Tiktok hit is about a woman in her late twenties, Irina, who roams the streets of Newcastle picking up men to photograph in various compromising, barely-consensual situations, including bondage and fetish. I have a very low tolerance for disaster women novels, and I also dislike grotesque fiction along the lines of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, disgusting to no purpose via its detailed descriptions of bodily functions. HOWEVER, Boy Parts is actually great! How? Basically, it’s totally because of Irina. Irina is the antidote to disaster women. She embraces her disaster. She brings disaster to others. Her delicious callousness is just hilarious, and so refreshing after reading a long string of stories about female victims. She’s both terrifying – the image of her hunting down her prey gave me flashbacks to Michel Faber’s Under The Skin – and weirdly endearing. In one particularly funny scene in a taxi, fangirl-Irina wrecks cool-Irina’s game by revealing just how much she knows about Lord of the Rings, a joke that keeps coming back throughout the book: advising her friend Flo to dump her boyfriend, who is trying to convince Flo that Irina is bad news, Irina texts: ‘Just don’t let him like grima wormtongue you’. For me, not quite as good as Penance, basically because of its narrower scope, but still unforgettable. My full review is on Goodreads.

The Other Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Julia by Sandra Newman. I hate dystopian fiction almost as much as I hate disaster women, so here’s another book that surprised me! Much of George Orwell’s work is now in the public domain in the UK, and so I guess this Julia’s-point-of-view-on-1984 story was inevitable. I’m glad that it was Newman who tackled it. I am very, very suspicious of faux-feminist premises that promise ‘a female perspective’ on a classic story – see my frustration with the multiple recent Greek mythology retellings. However, although I found Newman’s The Men bizarre and disjointed, I was impressed by its originality, and so I hoped Newman wouldn’t fall into usual dystopian tropes. Turns out, this was brilliant! It’s hard to argue that it completely stands on its own two feet – it’s so deeply steeped in the lore of 1984 – but as a fanfic, beautifully integrated into the gaps and inconsistencies of the original canon, Julia‘s terrific, and as a dystopian protagonist, Julia is enormously refreshing. My full review is on Goodreads. I borrowed this book from my local library #LoveYourLibrary

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez. This has been a very strong reading month and so I’m sorry, in a way, this has ended up here, but of the books I actually finished this month (I don’t think it’s right to put DNF books like Loot and The Hunter in this slot), this was probably the weakest. I did enjoy Raquel’s sections, but found Anita’s story tropey, overwritten and ultimately ill-considered in its very close connection to the real life and death of Ana Mendieta. My full review is here.

My Best (Children’s Fiction) Reread This Month Was…

L: the version I read as a child. R: the e-book reissue that I read this time around.

… Grinny by Nicholas Fisk. If anybody else had the misfortune to read this as a child, they will know it is literally one of the most terrifying books in existence. Eleven-year-old Timothy and his seven-year-old sister Beth are increasingly disturbed by the behaviour of their Great-Aunt Emma, nicknamed Grinny, who comes to stay out of the blue one day, and who has never been mentioned by their family before. Grinny has no smell; is resistant to injury; does not seem to understand normal human cues; but is terrified of electricity. What the hell can she be? Fisk cleverly tells this story through Timothy’s diary entries, which adds a real sense of creeping menace, as the walls close in and the children realise that they are the only ones who know the truth. I loved how capable and smart Fisk makes his very young protagonists, especially Beth, who has to deal with her brother’s misogynistic scorn but ultimately saves the human race. The sequel, You Remember Me! (included in this omnibus edition), is not as good but has to take some credit for featuring a climatic scene that has haunted me to this day. At least we can all THANK GOD that the modern cover is not as ungodly creepy as the original that I read – though anybody who innocently picks up this one is in for a shock!

My Best (Adult Fiction) Reread This Month Was…

… The Body Lies by Jo Baker. I first read this metafictional take on the kind of novel that starts with a dead woman back in 2019, when I thought it was ‘smart and creepy’. It’s interesting to reread it five years later, when these conversations about male violence and fictional representation have notionally moved on – and yet in many ways, they haven’t. Baker’s book is probably the best thing I’ve ever read on this trope, as she uses her unnamed protagonist, a lecturer in creative writing, to explore how female victims are encoded into the very structure of the stories that we tell. And yet, despite this theoretically literary material, The Body Lies is actually a beautifully grounded novel, wonderful on the simple rhythms of the protagonist’s life in the rural north, her relationship with her three-year-old son Sammy and the dynamics of the MA group she teaches. For my money, still easily Baker’s best book, and it also reads nicely alongside Boy Parts.

The Best Classic SF Novel I Read This Month Was…

… Earthlight by Arthur C. Clarke. I loved Clarke’s children’s novel Islands in the Sky about life on a space station when I was a child, and still love it as an adult; I must have read it about twenty times. I’ve always wanted to explore Clarke’s adult work, but hit a few dead ends; Childhood’s End was just too weird for me, though I wrote an academic article where it features! At last, I’ve hit gold; Earthlight is basically Islands in the Sky for grown-ups. Clarke imagines a future where humanity has colonised a number of planets in the solar system, but is now running short of crucial resources, which leads to tensions between Earth and ‘the Federation’ of other home-worlds. This short novel, set on the Moon, follows an agent sent to find a spy who’s passing crucial scientific information to the Federation. As with Islands in the Sky, Earthlight is short on character growth but long on imaginative incident. Clarke’s clarity is still unmatched for me, creating a fully convincing lunar world without ever getting bogged down in detail. I also love how practical his characters are in the face of danger: whether they’re trying to drive a crawler out of a dustbowl or hyperventilating oxygen so they can escape an ailing spaceship without suits, they could never be accused of getting emotional about it. Finally, it’s fascinating to witness this mix of accurate prediction and period detail play out: Clarke basically imagined geostationary communications satellites into being, but on his futuristic Moon, people still use computers with punch-cards, send telefaxes, and there’s of course no internet. Another novel that just does what it says on the tin, and I enjoyed it immensely.

The Best Modern SF Novel I Read This Month Was…

… In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. Written in a deliberately detached style, this follows Dutch microbiologist Leigh, who first encounters an anomaly in the Atlantic when working on a research ship, and who is then drawn into a wider project via her research on edible algae that may take her to the stars and beyond. For much of this book, I found it a gripping and, like Earthlight, engagingly practical piece of science fiction, but missed the deep character work of similar speculative novels (there’s a reason I keep writing Leah instead of Leigh in this review) like Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under The Sea. But while Armfield’s novel was really an exploration of grief, this review has convinced me that MacInnes is doing something rather different here: I like the idea that In Ascension deliberately places human experiences alongside other biological scales, and in doing so, captures ‘the environmental uncanny’. I also think there’s a reading of this novel that thinks about its detachment through the lens of Leigh’s childhood trauma. In Ascension is about the connectedness of all living things, but also about how disconnected we can become from the people physically and genetically closest to us. Leigh’s father beat her throughout her childhood, and her mother let it happen. Her sister Helena, who once stood so near to her that their breath mingled as one, now denies that Leigh was ever abused. Other reviewers have seen this novel as offering an apologetic for abusers, but I don’t think it’s doing that at all; Leigh’s perspective is distorted as she tries to rationalise what happened to her, but we get a glimpse of her resistance to the family narrative through Helena’s chapters, and it’s also just factually true that she has deliberately limited contact with her family through her all-encompassing choice of work. The publisher’s blurb presents this novel as a choice between human connection and journeying into the cosmos, but that’s not true: in fact, it’s only by leaving the earth that Leigh can find the links to other living things that she craves. Eerie and haunting.

What stood out to you this month? Are you tempted (or turned off) by any of these?

The Carol Shields Prize, 2024: The Future

Not to be confused with the other Future that came out recently.

In an alternate future, Fort Détroit was never surrendered by the French. Gloria comes to the city after her daughter dies and her two teen granddaughters disappear. As she tries to work out what happened to her family, she becomes integrated into the community built by the local adults, who grow their own food and provide medical care and emotional support to each other. But a parallel community has been constructed by the children living in the wild forest of Parc Rouge and on the banks of the river Rouge. The children’s world is harsh – any betrayal of information to adults is punished by exile, and members of the group are automatically banished after reaching puberty. But it’s also a world marked by co-operation, caring and ingenuity, as the kids sabotage machines set to pull down Détroit landmarks, and organise raids on local greenhouses for fruit.

Catherine Leroux’s The Future, translated from L’avenir, its French original, by Susan Ouriou, is beautifully hallucinatory, but also has some very real-world things to say about how we care for each other across generations. Interestingly, Leroux has stated that one of the major reasons she set this book in an alternate, Francophone Détroit is because ‘I wanted to be able to write dialogue that felt closer to the dialects and the French that I hear around me. And if I’m writing about English characters, but I’m writing their dialogue into French, then it can’t really take that shape’.  This rings true to me: alternate Détroit didn’t feel like it played a major role in the story, apart from the occasional awkward history-dump, but the language is gorgeously colloquial, so props to Ouriou for preserving that in the English translation. I loved how Leroux moves seamlessly between her characters’ heads, and I think she’s also managed to write the only dog point-of-view that I didn’t find hopelessly sentimental.

I’m always drawn to stories where children create their own worlds, but they tend either to assume feral chaos (Lord of the Flies), calculated horror (‘Children of the Corn’) or make the kids sad victims of circumstance who just need an adult to take charge. Leroux’s take is so much more nuanced. At first, we think these children’s communities are a short-lived thing born of trauma and displacement, but it turns out they have a much longer history in the Parc Rouge. The kids have their own way of understanding their changing environment, which, as with the indigenous Peruvian community in Natasha Pulley’s The Bedlam Stacks, is not ‘scientific’, but is none the less logical. There’s a touch of magical realism in The Future, but it’s possible that this is also just the children’s way of interpreting the strange things that are happening around them. I loved that the adults end up offering help to the children without taking away their autonomy, and that the focus is on a wider network of family relationships, including grandmother-granddaughters, rather than on the nuclear family unit.

I had a few issues with The Future: the first section, which focuses solely on the adults, is very slow, as the children are really the motor of the story, and this delayed introduction also meant that it took me a long while to tell many of the child characters apart. But these are minor quibbles. This is a thoughtful and wonderfully atmospheric book, a far better version of Lydia Millet’s The Children’s Bible, and I’m so glad to see it on the Carol Shields longlist.

I read this as a buddy read with Bookish Beck. Rebecca’s review is here. Thanks so much to Nicole Magas at Zgstories for sourcing a free e-ARC from the publisher for me.

I’m not aiming to read the full Carol Shields Prize longlist this year, but I’ve selected nine titles that I do want to read. This is number six. I’ve already read Birnam Wood, I Have Some Questions for You, Land of Milk and Honey, Loot and Brotherless Night.