February Superlatives, 2023

I originally borrowed this post format from Elle; I enjoyed writing these posts so much last year that I’ve decided to bring them back for 2023!

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai. Pleasingly, unlike the set of books I read in January, there was some stiff competition for this coveted slot this month, and I’ve put a couple of honourable mentions below. However, this prep school novel won through because it was one of those rare books that was both completely gripping and immersive, but also so thoughtful and thought-provoking. I just loved reading it so much. My full review is here.

Hon. mentions: Bad Cree by Jessica Johns and Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Witch in the Well by Camilla Bruce. This novel focuses on a rekindled rivalry between childhood friends Catherine and Elena after they both decide to write books about a figure that haunts the history of their town. That figure is Ilsbeth Clark, a woman accused of horrific crimes in the nineteenth century. It’s constructed mostly from a series of documents: Catherine and Elena’s own narratives, plus excerpts from Catherine’s novel and sections from the historical records she’s been researching in the archives. Another, undocumented voice intrudes occasionally, and refreshingly, but this is the bulk of the novel. And unfortunately, in striving to give Elena and Catherine distinctive voices, Bruce makes them both hopelessly irritating. Elena uses plentiful hashtags, CAPS LOCKS and exclamation marks; Catherine, despite her more formal prose, actually sounds quite similar; both come off as equally deluded. I’m a big fan of an unsympathetic narrator but they have to be interesting, and I had no interest in either of these women. The only bit that gave me any kind of frisson was the description of the ‘witch in the well’ game played in the school playground, stepping in and out of a circle of chalk; otherwise, this totally lacked atmosphere. I received a free proof copy of this book from the publisher for review.

My Favourite Reread This Month Was…

… The Life and Death of Sophie Stark by Anna North. I first read this novel back in 2015 and named it as one of my top ten books of the decade in 2019, so I’m glad it held up! It tells the story of unconventional filmmaker and director, Sophie Stark, though a range of narrators; Sophie herself never gets to narrate, but we hear from her lover, her brother, her husband, her producer. North’s prose is utterly hypnotic, and I spent most of the book trying to work out how she does it (especially as I’ve since read her Outlawed and liked it a lot, but didn’t think it was nearly this brilliant). I think what makes this book so great is its series of nested stories. It starts with a woman telling a story on a stage and never really leaves that mode. I felt glued to the page by the narrative drive of a campfire tale, even when the stories told were much more complex and difficult. Sophie herself is a fantastic character, properly weird rather than movie weird, and both hard to like and to truly dislike. It was particularly special to read this book around visiting a wonderful exhibition at the film museum in Amsterdam, Saodat Ismailova’s 18,000 Worlds.

Hon. mention: Orkney by Amy Sackville, which I liked as much as I did last time I read it, back in 2013… but I do think it should have been a novella, which is possibly the only time I’ve ever said that!

The Best Ghost Story I Read This Month Was…

… The Upstairs Room by Kate Murray-Browne. Another reread! This debut, which I first read back in 2018, has been so thoroughly misunderstood by Goodreads reviewers that I want to shout its praises everywhere. It’s not a thriller or a (traditional) ghost story, but a deeply unsettling dissection of why we settle where and when we do – whether that’s in a relationship, in a job, or in a house. Any summary of the novel makes it sound like a mix of the ‘rootless millennial woman’ genre crossed with ‘middle-aged people’s marriage troubles’, but Murray-Browne’s writing is just so good: one of the writers that makes me feel I’m looking more clearly at the world after reading her, that my own life has been placed into better order. I’d shelve this next to Naomi Booth’s Exit Management. I’m thrilled to hear that Murray-Browne has a new novel coming out in 2024, which sounds great: ‘One Girl Began entwines the stories of three women, separated by history but connected by the same building. For Ellen in 1909, it is a box factory where she finds work and a transformative circle of friendship when her family fall on hard times. For Frances in 1984, it is a derelict ruin, where she joins a group of squatters and is drawn into a coercive relationship. And for Amanda in 2020, it is a gentrified conversion, where she finds herself trapped in a tiny flat and grappling with new motherhood as the pandemic looms into view. Over the span of 111 years these three women will come to haunt one another backwards and forwards in time.’

The Silliest Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. Jamie is fired from his job at a food delivery start-up at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic but then gets a new job opportunity; he can go and work in an alternative version of Earth, where tropical jungle covers Canada and enormous kaiju roam wild. But as the kaiju are powered by organic nuclear reactors, things could quickly get out of hand. This book is not intended to be serious. As Scalzi writes in his afterword, ‘KPS is not, and I say this with absolutely no slight intended, a brooding symphony of a novel. It’s a pop song.’ And it is pretty much as silly and fun as it promises, with a likeable protagonist and a serviceable secondary cast of scientists who work with the kaiju. For peak escapism, I would have preferred it to be a bit more immersive – the jungle setting is barely described and I felt like there was too much snarky dialogue, not enough space for the concept to breathe. Still, it’s hard to feel badly towards this novel.

The Best Sequel I Read This Month Was…

… Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo. I was worried that this sequel to Ninth House might have too much action for me, but while I feel this Yale-set dark academia series could still stand to let its characters breathe a bit more, Hell Bent hits about the same balance as the first book, and is just as atmospheric. Alex is back for a second year at Yale, trying to perform the duties of Lethe by herself while investigating the mysterious murders of two faculty members. Looking forward to the third book!

Have you read any standout books in February?

Advertisement

Three Non-Fiction Reads on Sex, Gender and Sexuality: Hijab Butch Blues, Just One of The Guys? and The Right To Sex

Hijab Butch Blues is structured as a series of non-chronological essays, each of which could easily stand alone, which intertwine Lamya’s explorations of her sexuality and faith with stories from the Quran. Lamya skips between her early childhood in an unnamed South Asian country to the rest of her childhood and adolescence in an unnamed Middle Eastern country to her adulthood in New York, reflecting on how difficult it has been for her to square her identities as a hijabi Muslim and a gay woman, but also how these different ways of living have illuminated each other. This memoir demonstrates how, although Lamya knows that her Muslim family wouldn’t accept her queerness, she herself has found great solace in her faith. Unsurprisingly, some of the essays are stronger than others, with the autobiographical material tying more smoothly into the selected Quran sections, but when the pairings work, they’re brilliant.

The opening and closing essays are two of the strongest and most moving. In the first, fourteen-year-old Lamya is bowled over in school by reading Surah Maryam, the story of Maryam (more familiar to a Christian audience as the story of Mary), realising that Maryam went to live alone in a mosque and, when told by the angel that she was going to have a baby boy, said ‘How can I have a boy when no man has touched me?’ This passage was revelatory to Lamya as well: ‘Miss, did Maryam say that no man has touched her because she didn’t like men?’. Although her teacher tells her that Maryam was simply trying to send the angel away because she knew that God is always watching and believed he was trying to tempt her, Lamya is sure that she knows differently: ‘Maryam is a dyke.’ In the final essay, an adult Lamya rants about how Yunus (familiar as Jonah to Christian readers) is her least favourite prophet: ‘Yunus’s big claim to fame is that he gets swallowed by a whale. And then the whale spits him out… He does very little else in the story…. He preaches about Islam to his people, but they don’t listen to him so he decides he’s done and he leaves.’ However, her friend convinces her to look again at Yunus, arguing that there can be a strength in knowing when you are not going to convince anyone, and need to protect yourself instead, something Lamya embraces when she decides not to come out to her family.

However, even in the essays where I felt the parallels were a bit more forced, the links between this material make Hijab Butch Blues stand out from other memoirs about sexuality I’ve read. Impressively, also, despite jumping back and forth in time, Lamya’s stories never feel repetitive. My only note (not a complaint, but a note) is that readers looking for a focus on the ‘butch’ part of the title may be disappointed: Lamya is clear that she likes to dress in more masculine clothing, and talks a bit about a bad date where she and another butch woman both try to play the gentleman, but the idea of butchness isn’t really interrogated or explored in the same way as her other identities. Nevertheless, this is a great memoir.

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

Just One of The Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Equality, an American sociological study from 2011, has one central argument: while trans men face various kinds of oppression and discrimination in the workplace, it can be surprising how easily non-trans men accept them as ‘just one of the guys’. However, as trans men are accepted into male social circles, they often realise just how far they were excluded and belittled when they were seen as women. Kristen Schilt both respects the importance of trans men’s experiences and uses them as a window into how hierarchies of sexuality and gender operate at work. In short, the acceptance of trans men by cis, heterosexual men isn’t because they are more enlightened than we thought; it’s because it’s easier to incorporate trans men, especially trans men who ‘pass’ as male, on one side of the gender binary. ‘The power to exclude is also the power to include’, Schilt points out. Establishing trans men as just like any other straight man means they don’t cause any further ‘gender trouble’.

This becomes clear when people react to gay trans men, who often face much more resistance than straight trans men. Schilt quotes one of her audience members: ‘Why would trans men go through so much trouble just to be gay?’ More privileged trans men – often white, tall, and educated – sometimes benefited directly from transition at work. Chris reflected, ‘I have this professional company that I built, and I have people following me. They trust me, they believe in me, they respect me. I never could have done that as a woman.’ While white trans men appreciated feeling less visible in public, though, black trans men, like Keith, had to deal with becoming hypervisible: ‘I went from being an obnoxious black woman to a scary black man’. Trans men also often went from feeling like they had to try extra hard to be taken seriously as men to criticising and challenging rigid rules of masculinity, like sexist banter: ‘Men just think that is how guys are supposed to talk to one another. They don’t even really believe it. It is like this male lingo… It is like a script.’ In other words, trans men didn’t feel that they were the ones ‘performing’ masculinity in these kinds of encounters. Really fascinating, if framed with a bit too much academic gender theory.

I found the first three essays in Amia Srinivasan’s short essay collection, The Right To Sex, disappointing. Srinivasan writes very well, and I would certainly recommend these essays to my students, but I felt she was covering ground I already knew well. It’s in her fourth essay, ‘Coda: The Politics of Desire’, exploring responses to her ‘The Right To Sex’ essay originally published in the LRB, that things get interesting. Srinivasan digs deep into a vexed feminist question: is who we desire political? If so, should we try and change our desires? You only need to go on a dating app to see that what Srinivasan calls ‘fuckability’, or ‘whose bodies confer status on those who have sex with them’ is about race, gender and disability, among other axes of oppression. East Asian men struggle to get dates; black women are viewed as promiscuous and as less attractive than white women; East Asian women are sought after by white men for their assumed passivity. But, as Srinivasan recognises, while we might accept there’s a problem here, the solution is not so easy.  ‘When I was a first-year undergraduate I had a professor who said, to our grave disappointment, that there would be heartbreak even in the post-capitalist utopia.’ Some people find it very hard to find a sexual partner or to have a romantic relationship, and this does not always cut along lines of oppression. I found myself thinking of when I was a teenage girl, white, slim, able-bodied, relatively pretty, with long blondish hair – and the total lack of romantic interest I received from anyone. Indeed, my peers enjoyed mocking how unlikely it was that I would ever find a boyfriend.

Reading this essay and others in Srinivasan’s collection, I found myself wondering if we’re asking the wrong questions. If society didn’t elevate sexual experience and romantic love so far above any other kind of love – if we didn’t always put these kinds of relationships first – would we be so desperate to achieve them? When I was a teenage girl, I didn’t want a boyfriend (partly because I didn’t fancy boys but partly because I didn’t actually want any kind of relationship at that time). I felt I ought to have one because ‘having a boyfriend’ gave you social status, proved you were normal, proved (in my head) that you’d go on to get married and have children in the future, to succeed. What would a world look like where we don’t tell people that having had sex means you are more ‘mature’, that we are all bound to be lonely if we don’t have sex, don’t have one monogamous partner, don’t feel romantic love? (As an aside, it’s a shame that Srinivasan’s discussion of Adrienne Rich’s great essay, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, doesn’t more clearly explain that Rich’s idea of the ‘lesbian continuum’ means that she emphasises that lesbianism is not just about who you have sex with. Being a ‘lesbian’, in Rich’s terms, is about directing your emotional energies towards women, whether that’s through working and creating together, or through friendship. Rich does write about heterosexuality as a political institution that hurts all women, whoever they desire, but she has so much more to say!)

And then… the last two essays in the collection were much the same as the first three, although I liked them a bit more, and thoroughly agreed with Srinivasan’s argument in ‘Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism’ that a feminism that focuses on the punishment of individual men through the police state is not doing its job:  ‘Feminists must ask what it is they set in motion and against whom, when they demand more policing and more prisons.’ I also liked the point she makes, in ‘On Not Sleeping With Your Students’, that consensually sleeping with your students is bad pedagogy, a kind of bad pedagogy that works specifically against women by making them feel that they are not really smart, only sexy (though I wished that essay hadn’t ended with sweeping assumptions about how ‘young’ Gen Z are). So, good, on the whole, but spent too much time going over the basics: can Srinivasan please write a coda to every one of these essays?

 

‘God forbid bad thing’: A Spell of Good Things by Ayòbámi Adébáyò

He took good fortune for granted. As though it were impossible that it would abide only for a spell. She had never been able to shake the sense that life was war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things.

The two central characters of Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s second novel, A Spell of Good Things, set in a Nigerian city, come from very different walks of life. Wúràọlá is from an elite family and is finishing off her training as a doctor; boyfriend Kúnlé seems likely to propose soon, but does she really want to marry him? Meanwhile, teenager Ẹniọlá’s family have fallen on hard times; after all the history teachers in public schools were sacked in a government purge, his father has been unable to find a new job and money is getting increasingly tight. Ẹniọlá fears that his family will no longer be able to pay his school fees, taking away his only chance of making it to university. However, Wúràọlá and Ẹniọlá are only two of a complex tapestry of characters that Adébáyò brings to life: from Wúràọlá’s warm-hearted, loving father, to Ẹniọlá’s ambitious younger sister, Bùsọ́lá, who wants to study forestry, to Wúràọlá’s delightful, easy-going friend Kingsley, who calls her ‘golden babe’ and is secretly in love with her.

The structure and the pacing of A Spell of Good Things, despite its very different setting, reminded me strongly of another heartbreaking novel I read three years ago: Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line. While A Spell of Good Things is narrated straightforwardly in third person rather than through the lens of a young boy, as in Djinn Patrol, the novels have a very similar feel: both build up slowly and a little frustratingly towards a sudden, harrowing ending that justifies some of the length of the story, though perhaps not all of it. Like Djinn Patrol, A Spell of Good Things is rich in set-piece but a little short on purpose for about three-quarters of its pages. Adébáyò flips between perspectives cleverly; this kind of head-hopping can feel shallow but here it works very well, allowing us to truly feel Bùsọ́lá’s frustration at her shortage of books, or Ẹniọlá’s Aunty Caro’s business savvy as she runs her tailors. It was a shame, though, that for much of the novel I felt much more invested in Ẹniọlá’s side of the story than Wúràọlá’s, basically because the stakes were higher. I liked that their two worlds don’t cross over until the very end, and in the most poignant of ways, but this meant that I often felt torn away from a narrative that seemed much more urgent to return to Wúràọlá’s quieter world.

Adébáyò’s debut, Stay With Me, impressed me with its emotional impact, managing to make the reader really share its central character’s pain. A Spell of Good Things manages to engage us in the same way, but it lacks the elegant, compulsive structure of Stay With Me, which beautifully used Nigerian folktales and the ‘rule of three’ to explore a sense of destiny that also governs this novel (it’s surely no accident that the school that Ẹniọlá fights to stay in is called Glorious Destiny). This makes this book harrowing but also a little purposeless; how much this bothers you will depend on your own appetite for tragedy. One thing’s for certain: if I was a betting woman, I’d definitely bet on this making the Women’s Prize longlist.

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

#MeToo and #MeToo: I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

A personal note: THANK GOD I finally read a book I loved in 2023!

Bodie is returning to her old prep school, Granby, for the first time since the 1990s to teach a couple of elective classes in film studies and podcasting. But once she arrives, she finds herself drawn back to the many questions she has about the murder of her roommate, Thalia, at the end of their junior year. The athletics coach, a black man called Omar, was convicted of Thalia’s murder and has spent twenty-five years in prison. But Bodie never thought he did it – and now she’s back at Granby, she realises that she may be able to find the evidence to prove it.

At first glance, I Have Some Questions For You might seem like yet another #MeToo novel, and I’m sympathetic to readers who see it that way (I had similar complaints about Kate Reed Petty’s True Story and Winnie M Li’s Complicit). However, I think Rebecca Makkai’s take on the topic both rises above most of the rest and is doing something a bit different. First, I Have Some Questions For You is clearly not only in conversation with #MeToo but with the ‘true crime’ genre, its potential and its pitfalls – it turns out that my guess that it might ‘resonate with Becky Cooper’s non-fiction account of a murder at Harvard, We Keep The Dead Close‘ was spot on. Second, it’s something of a meta #MeToo novel in that Bodie constantly reflects on how the same stories keep getting told about murdered and sexually assaulted women, and yet nothing ever changes: ‘The story was on MSNBC, too. The one where the judge said the swimmer was so promising. The one where the rapist reminded the judge of himself as a young rapist. It was the one where her body was never found. It was the one where her body was found in the snow. It was the one where he left her body for dead under the tarp.’ Third, it’s just a really well-written book: incredibly gripping, but with nuanced, interesting characterisation that isn’t sacrificed for the sake of extra drama.

However, what I really loved about I Have Some Questions For You was its treatment of Bodie, and the way she constantly reassesses her adolescent self and her memories of her time at Granby. It’s basically a cross between Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa and Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, two other brilliant novels with this intelligent, observant quality. I don’t think I’ve read a novel other than Prep that is so good at capturing the things that matter when we’re adolescents, how hard it is to get a grip on how others see us and yet how fervently we feel we know exactly where we are in the pecking order. But because, unlike Prep, Makkai has the older Bodie explicitly reflect on her adolescent self from the vantage point of adulthood, we really get to see how she reassesses her own narratives. As a teenager, Bodie was continually sexually harassed and stalked by one of her classmates, Dorian, who pretended that she was obsessed with him and publicly humiliated her on multiple occasions, as well as flashing her and groping her. She wrote this off in adulthood as just school bullying, but it’s clear that it was profoundly traumatising. Here, Makkai also gets us to reflect on what we consider to be ‘serious’, and how things that happen between children and young people at school are often seen as less serious than when an older adult is involved.

I Have Some Questions For You inevitably sidelines Omar’s story to focus on Bodie’s, given that she is the narrator, although it is acutely aware that he is the biggest victim save Thalia. However, Bodie is not the rich white woman taking a prurient interest in this case that the press paint her as in the novel. She is the survivor of a traumatic childhood (father and brother dead, mum checked out) that became knotted into her feelings about Thalia’s murder in ways she untangles throughout the narrative. She’s undoubtedly a flawed character, but that doesn’t make her an unsympathetic one, and it’s the richness of her characterisation that distinguishes this from many other novels of its kind. So: a #MeToo novel, yes, but one that’s about so much more as well.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 23rd February.

January Superlatives, 2023

I originally borrowed this post format from Elle; I enjoyed writing these posts so much last year that I’ve decided to bring them back for 2023!

I have to say that January has been a bit of a slow reading month, although I did read a decent number of books despite quite a few DNFs. I haven’t read anything that I either really loved or really hated (though I did feel strongly about Geraldine Brooks’ March, as you can see from my rant). Last January, I read two books that went on to feature in my Top Ten Books of the year list; this January, I’ve read nothing I’d even consider to be in the running. I’m hoping that February will see some properly superlative superlatives!

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Yerba Buena by Nina LaCour. Women’s fiction often falls flat for me – especially women’s fiction where the writer has previously only written YA, as is the case with LaCour. But I was completely absorbed by this gentle story of Creole florist and house renovator, Emilie, and artistic bartender, Sara, as they fall in love despite their difficult pasts. LaCour’s prose is so perfectly simple. Adore the cover, too!

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal. Argh, so disappointing! I was so sure I would love this story of a female medium working in the ‘Spirit Corps’ during the First World War, talking to the ghosts of men who have recently been killed to extract important information. I adored Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series, which put a similar speculative spin on modern history, and I’m also a fan of her short stories. This started well but moved away from its clever premise to become more of a spy story set in the trenches; I also wasn’t invested in the central romantic relationship, which is so crucial to the story that my lack of investment felt a bit like a death knell for this novel. I’ll be reading Kowal’s new stuff but avoiding her backlist in future.

My Best Re-Read This Month Was…

… Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. Once I discovered that the sequel to this Yale-set dark academia novel was about to come out, I realised that although I’d really enjoyed Ninth House back in 2019, I remembered very little about it. Time for a re-read! Interestingly, I’d say I liked Ninth House both more and less this time round. Its complicated system of magic-using secret societies  felt much clearer to me on a re-read, and I navigated the multiple plot strands and time jumps much less painfully. However, I found myself wishing that Bardugo would give herself more time to simply explore this world and its characters and pack rather less action into the novel. (I’ve heard that the next one, Hell Bent, is even more plot-driven.) This reread also made me reflect on how much the dark academia sub-genre has moved on in the last three years, especially regarding its treatment of social justice. What felt fresh back in 2019 now seems rather tokenistic after reading the A Deadly Education trilogy, Catherine House and Babel. I had a lot of fun rereading this and I still want to read Hell Bent, but I’ve tempered my expectations.

The Novel That Felt Most Like I’d Read It Somewhere Else Before This Month Was…

… The Divines by Ellie Eaton. This novel is narrated by Josephine, who was a pupil at English boarding school St John the Divine in the 1990s and is now newly married; the narration moves between Josephine’s final year at the school and her first few years of married life. Eaton is a skilful writer, but this ultimately reminded me too strongly of other novels I’ve read about cloistered schools, teenage girls and early sexual experience, especially Bella Bathurst’s Special (also centred around a life-threatening fall!), Robin Wasserman’s Girls on Fire (shares the same uncomfortable ‘plot twist’!), and Tana French’s far superior The Secret Place. The final chapters, where Josephine is forced to reassess her own and others’ mismemories of their girlhood, are compelling, and this thread could have been introduced earlier, but it wasn’t enough to make this book stand out to me.

The Most Underwhelming Piece of Literary Fiction I Read This Month Was…

… Trespasses by Louise Kennedy. This debut’s plot treads cliched lines; Cushla, a Catholic primary school teacher in 1975 Belfast, falls in love with an older, married Protestant barrister, Michael, and they embark upon an affair. Kennedy’s prose is intelligent, accomplished, often impressive; and yet I felt like each chapter followed a sequence familiar from much literary fiction, with the accumulation of a series of beautifully observed details (and Kennedy does brilliantly evoke Belfast during the Troubles), the deliberately inconsequential dialogue, the minimal interiority. On the other hand, this probably wouldn’t have felt so rote-like to me if I’d been emotionally invested in the narrative, and I never was. Admirable, but for me it felt like a text to study rather than to love.

The Best Short Story Collection I Read This Month Was…

… The Frangipani Hotel by Violet Kupersmith. I had mixed feelings about Kupersmith’s debut novel, Build Your House Around My Body, but was impressed by its clever puzzle-box narrative and some indelible set-pieces, and loved the bonus short story that was included at the end of my edition. My hope was that I would like Kupersmith even more as a short story writer than as a novelist. This turned out not to be the case – I think whatever she writes next will be her best thing yet, as she’s clearly still developing her obvious talents – but this collection was worth reading. The first story in the collection, ‘Boat Story’, where a granddaughter wants to hear her grandmother’s dramatic tale of escaping from Vietnam in a small boat but gets an unnerving ghost story instead, tells us what we’re in for. Only a couple of stories really stood out to me in the way that Kupersmith’s other vignettes have: my favourite was ‘Little Brother’, where an elderly Vietnamese trucker takes on a disturbing passenger, and I also liked ‘The Frangipani Hotel’, which hints at a macabre family history but resists telling us too much, and ‘Turning Back’, where a teenage girl living in Houston meets an old man who keeps turning into a python. If you’ve read Build Your House…, you’ll see how certain motifs link the two books, and it’s the stories that resonated with that later novel that I found the most vivid and unnerving. Nevertheless, Kupersmith writes so fluidly that I sped through this collection.

The Most Disappointing Book I Read This Month Was…

… Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty. This was one of my most anticipated releases of 2022, but unfortunately my expectations were wrong: I thought it would be a collection of speculative short stories, but it’s actually a novel told in linked episodes with no speculative elements at all. David, or Dee, is a young Penobscot man growing up on ‘the rez’; he and his family experience poverty, violence and drug addiction, while he spends long, aimless days with best friend Fellis, structured only around visits to the methadone clinic. The issues faced by Native communities that Talty highlights here are undoubtedly important, but this didn’t work for me at all as fiction. Most of the chapters have been previously published as short stories, and I can see how they’d function as one-offs: I actually loved the first, very short section of this book, ‘Burn’, where Dee is trying to score some pot and comes across Fellis stuck in the swamp with his braid frozen to the ground. But when they’re put together, they feel repetitive and shapeless, and despite a few powerful paragraphs, Talty’s prose is workmanlike, often flat: ‘I pressed a Q-tip soaked in peroxide against the wound and winced. I dried the area and put Neosporin on it. Behind the mirror I found a box of assorted Band-Aids and stuck a medium-small one vertically between my eye and nose.’ Sadly, this wasn’t for me.

The Best Memoir I Read This Month Was…

… Ten Steps To Nanette by Hannah Gadsby. I very rarely read memoirs by even quasi-celebrities; ironically, I think the last one I read was Tom Allen’s No Shame, which I very much enjoyed. Gadsby, like Allen, is of course a queer comedian, known for her Netflix smash hit Nanette. However, Nanette was the product of twelve years on the comedy circuit and a lifetime’s struggles, proving the truth of the classic comedy adage that Gadsby quotes in this memoir: ‘comedy is trauma plus time‘. Like No Shame, Ten Steps to Nanette is clearly not written by somebody who writes books professionally; however, I liked the unwieldiness of it, the rambliness, and of course the humour. Even more refreshing was Gadsby’s honesty about how very hard she found it, and still finds it, to ‘fit in’. Lots of writers tell us about their awkward teen experiences but we very rarely hear from anyone who struggled for more than a few years in adolescence, or struggled to the degree that Gadsby obviously did. It was only later in life that Gadsby would be diagnosed with both autism and ADHD, which for her explained a lot about why life had always been so hard. Yet whether or not you share her diagnoses, Ten Steps to Nanette comes as a big relief for anyone whose ‘weirdness’ went beyond the socially-acceptable narrative of ‘I was bullied for a bit at school and was a geek but then pulled it together at university/in my early twenties’. Highly recommended.

The Novel I Spent Longest Reading This Month Was…

… Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears. I started this 600-page brick back in mid-December but read the vast majority of it this month. It moves backwards in time – which was what attracted me to it in the first place – from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890 to Venice in 1867, unpicking the complicated history of a couple of members of the global financial elite and the women they become involved with. Stone’s Fall is an old-fashioned novel in several ways. It’s a deliberate pastiche of the kind of Victorian sensation novel that Wilkie Collins might have written, with affairs, madmen, mysterious deaths and stock market scheming. But also, although it only came out in 2009, I find it hard to imagine this being published today: it’s so indulgently long, and the female characters very much fit a certain mould of smart-but-unhinged, sexily mysterious but not quite human. Having said all that, I had a lot of fun reading the final two-thirds of this novel, where our two different narrators, both men of influence, take us through some entertaining plots and alternative, behind-the-scenes history; the majority of the month and a half it took me to read Stone’s Fall was spent on the first third, where a naive journalist narrator tried my patience and nothing seemed to happen but a slow accumulation of detail that we’ll need later. If I’d known this in advance, I’d have plowed through the first section more quickly. But this still manages to be the best book I’ve read by Pears.

The Book I Read In December But Which Didn’t Make It Into My December Round-Ups Was*…

… Life by Gwyneth Jones. And what a very strange book it was. Life had moments of brilliance but also moments that I found troubling and others that seemed redundant. The novel promises to be about the breakdown of chromosomal sex after the discovery of ‘Transferred Y’, or TY, by scientist Anna Senoz. However, TY turns out to be much more destabilising for society’s ideas about gender than for biological sex itself; as Anna explains, the ‘death’ of the Y chromosome doesn’t mean that sexually dimorphic men and women won’t continue to make up the vast majority of the population, even if men are now all technically intersex, because the masculinising SRY gene remains intact on one of men’s X chromosomes. Life, therefore, is really about the ‘sex wars’ and the tension between heterosexual sexual attraction and the more equal sexual relationships that some men and women are trying to forge. TY is such a problem because people believe there are fundamental genetic differences between men and women, and because they believe these matter for society to function. Gwyneth Jones is a bold and intelligent writer, but I felt uncomfortable with the treatment of lesbians, in particular, and the way the narrative flipped between being set in a speculative future where sex and gender are being reconstructed, and rehashing old feminist debates from the 1970s and 1980s. Ultimately, I believed in Anna as a character and she carried the book for me, even when it became baffling.

*very dubious superlative

‘Becoming a Marmee’: March by Geraldine Brooks

My edition of March and my edition of Little Women

One of my favourite chapters in Little Women comes near the very end. After Beth’s death and her other sisters’ marriages, Jo is at home alone caring for her parents and the household, and she’s utterly miserable: ‘Jo… was learning to do her duty and to feel unhappy if she did not, but to do it cheerfully – ah, that was another thing! She had often said she wanted to do something splendid, no matter how hard, and now she had her wish, for what could be more beautiful than to devote her life to Father and Mother, trying to make home as happy to them as they had to her? And if difficulties were necessary to increase the splendour of the effort, what could be harder for a restless, ambitious girl than to give up her own hopes, plans and desires and cheerfully live for others?’ Jo’s struggles mirror her mother’s. In a more famous scene earlier in the text, which is also one of my favourites, Marmee admits to Jo: ‘I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo, but I have learned not to show it, and I still hope to learn not to feel it.’

Like it or not, this ethos of self-sacrifice is at the heart of Little Women. To a modern reader, Jo and Marmee’s efforts towards self-abnegation may feel horrifying, demonstrating the internalised misogyny of the mid-nineteenth century (although I’d say that Mr March preaches and tries to practice the same ideas). This essay on Marmee hits the nail on the head about her role in the book: ‘The prospect of becoming a Marmee, “Little Women” tells us, is simultaneously an aspiration and a threat. Marmee is at once far more interesting than many readers may recognize and also a major narrative problem.’ Viewing Marmee as simply a cautionary tale of the fate that awaits Jo if she can’t break free, however, is just as reductive as viewing her as an ideal woman and cozy maternal figure. Jo herself recognises this, I think, though she doesn’t say it in so many words. Marmee is clearly the person she most admires in the world, and not because of traditional ideas about being a ‘good wife’ and mother but because of the moral example Marmee sets. Jo has always had scarily high standards for herself and others, and it’s Marmee who both introduced her to those standards and comforts her when she falls short.

Although we may not agree with Marmee, Jo, and Mr March about the way they see duty, Little Women loses a lot of its power if we don’t understand how emotionally important this philosophy of living is to them, and how far Marmee and Mr March have been changed by trying to live in this way. And here, we come to Geraldine Brooks’s March. Much of this novel retells the story of Little Women from Mr March’s point of view, as he works as a chaplain during the American Civil War, ending up teaching basic literacy to newly freed black men, women and children on a southern plantation that has been captured by Union forces. And during this section of the novel, Brooks beautifully inhabits the mindset and moral world of Little Women. The voice she develops for Mr March is spot-on. As he struggles with the tension between preaching the right thing to do and doing it yourself, between taking action and knowing when to stand back, his internal difficulties have the same kind of resonance for modern readers that Jo’s struggles did in Little Women, even though we ask ourselves different questions.

The first two-thirds of the novel also feature Marmee. Mr March flashes back to when he first met Marmee as a young woman and how taken aback he was by her temper. During one of her outbursts at dinner during their courtship, two other women ‘standing one on either side… half patted, half held her, as one would both soothe and restrain a lunging, growling dog.’ Although Marmee is often quite right in what she says, I really enjoyed how ugly Brooks makes her in these moments of rage. It would have been easy to present her as righteously angry from a modern perspective, but Brooks gets us to see how shocking her behaviour is in the nineteenth-century context, and to recoil slightly from her ourselves. And once Marmee and Mr March marry, we see how they work together to live their lives in the service of their principles, providing a safe house as part of the Underground Railroad (these scenes gave me pause, especially a sentimental encounter between a young, formerly enslaved woman and Beth; it feels very white-saviour, but then again, that is the point of the book, that Mr March sees himself and his family as white saviours, and so he’s obviously going to tell us these kind of stories).

It’s all the more disappointing, then, when Brooks decides to give us Marmee’s point of view in the last few chapters of the story, and all this careful work crashes down. She never wanted her husband to go to war, Marmee tells us, but ‘one is not permitted to say such a thing; it is just one more in the long list of things that a woman must not say… I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces.’ This Thousand Ships-style authorial intervention just feels utterly alien to everything Marmee was in Little Women, and everything that makes her such an interesting character. Brooks’ Marmee wouldn’t make efforts to govern her temper, and she certainly wouldn’t tell Jo to do so. Her whole life has been a miserable kind of pretence, so she doesn’t have any wisdom to pass on. She’s a figure to be pitied, not admired or emulated. Ironically, in ‘giving Marmee a voice’, Brooks diminishes her as a character.

I so wanted to love this novel and for the first two-thirds or so, I did. But I wish Brooks had held back and allowed us to make up our own minds about how we feel about Marmee and Mr March. For me, the contradictions at the heart of Little Women, as with so many nineteenth-century novels, especially those about younger women (What Katy Did, The Mill on the Floss, the Emily of New Moon novels) are what gives it such power today. Answering its questions so boldly does it no favours.

If you want even more of my thoughts on Little Women, check out this post where I compare the 2017 and 2019 adaptations of the novel and pontificate about the characters.

 

My Top Ten Books of 2022

It’s time for another top ten books of the year list! (You can find my 2021 post here, my 2020 post here, my 2019 post here, my 2018 post here, my 2017 post here, my 2016 post here, my 2015 post here, and my 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 posts on my old blog.) For clarity, these are my ten favourite books I have read this year, regardless of when they were published.

A note: If 2021 was a weak reading year, 2022 was an exceptionally strong one! Plenty of my commended books could also have appeared on this list.

In no particular order…

1. The Dispossessed: Ursula Le Guin. This classic SF novel has rightly swept many readers across the decades off their feet; it’s such an intelligent, detailed and honest exploration of what an anarchist society might look like, and how that would change the kind of people we are. I wrote briefly about it here.

2. Our Wives Under The Sea: Julia Armfield. MY OBSESSION. After Miri’s biologist wife Leah returns from a mysterious deep-sea mission, she realises that the Leah who left is not the person who’s come back. A book about grief, but also a very fine horror novel. I reviewed it here.

3. Finding The Mother Tree: Suzanne Simard. Many writers want to combine memoir and nature-writing and very few succeed. Simard does it perfectly, and she’s also the protagonist of a fascinating, revolutionary scientific investigation that would have been enough for a book on its own, as she explores how trees of different species share resources and information via an underground fungal network. I wrote briefly about it here.

4. The First Woman: Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. Teenage Kirabo explores the secrets of her own family against a backdrop of Ugandan folktales during Idi Amin’s dictatorship in the 1970s. Makumbi’s writing is incredible: she lets her story speak for itself in a local vernacular that is so clever, vivid and alive. I wrote briefly about it here.

5. The Anthill: Julianne Pachico. Lina spent her early childhood in Medellín but left for England when she was eight; now she’s returned to the city as an uncomfortable outsider. This book is both a merciless, brilliantly observed critique of foreign visitors to Columbia and a haunting horror story that uses ghostly tropes to explore a character and a country’s traumatic past. In the end, we can never really come home. I wrote briefly about it here.

6. Spirits Abroad: Zen Cho. I didn’t love every story in this collection but about half of it was so wonderful that I felt it belonged on this list anyway. Cho expertly combines dry wit, Malaysian folklore, a hint of horror, and her own superb imagination. Best stories: ‘The Terra-Cotta Bride’ and ‘The House of Aunts’. I reviewed it here.

7. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: Gabrielle Zevin. Of course I loved this gorgeous tale of work, friendship, making art, storytelling and play. Sam and Sadie design video games together, but you don’t need to like video games to like this novel, which is really about the challenges of creating. I reviewed it here.

8. To Paradise: Hanya Yanagihara. CONTROVERSIAL. This wasn’t an instant smash hit for me but I haven’t stopped thinking about it all year, especially the third section of the novel, ‘Zone Eight’. The questions Yanagihara asks about how societies that seem dystopic to us may actually have benefits for those who suffer in our society are just not questions I’ve seen being explored anywhere else. I reviewed it here.

9. The Sentence: Louise Erdrich. Should have won the Women’s Prize! This isn’t a perfect novel but I felt that Erdrich brought a whole world to life through the warm, humorous voice of her Objiwe narrator, Tookie. I reviewed it here.

10. Bloodchild and Other Stories: Octavia E. Butler. Five incredible miniature pieces of science fiction (plus a couple things that didn’t work for me, but whatever). Best stories: ‘Amnesty’ and ‘Bloodchild’. I wrote about it briefly here.

Reading Stats

I read 190 books in 2022. This is an all-time record, but I’m not sure why I read more this year than in previous years! In 2023, I’ll again set a target of 150, as I don’t like having a target that’s too ambitious. Of the 190 books I read, 25 were re-reads, a significant improvement over the 11 books I re-read in 2021.

I read 162 books by women (including 1 trans woman) and 28 books by men (including 2 trans men). I think this is the fewest number of books by men I’ve ever read in one year, totalling just 15% of my total reading. I wanted to read more books by men of colour and trans men this year, and I did up my numbers in that respect. Also notable: this is the only time that my top ten books of the year have all been written by women.

I read 72 books by writers of colour and 118 books by white writers. This means I have FINALLY achieved (and smashed) my target of reading 33% of books by writers of colour, getting it up to 38%. I have to say, I’ve really noticed how much more diverse my reading has felt this year, and I’m glad that six of my top ten books of the year were by women of colour. Once again, I will aim to read 33% books by writers of colour in 2022.

Finally, here’s what Goodreads thinks was My Year In Books: 

2022 In Books: Commendations and Disappointments

As always, I won’t be posting my Top Ten Books of 2022 until the 31st December, but here are some books that almost made my top ten – and also my biggest disappointments of the year. Links are to my reviews. All books are first read by me in 2022, not necessarily first published in 2022.

Highly Commended

2022 was a very good year for short story collections. Two have made my Top Ten, but there were many others that I loved. Kate Folk’s Out There is part of the Julia Armfield/Carmen Maria Machado/Mary South/Irenosen Okojie feminist body horror axis, but for my money, is better than the story collections by any of those writers. NK Jemisin’s How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? showcased some incredible novels-in-a-bottle SF shorts. Anthony Veasna So’s first and last collection, Afterparties, unifies beautifully around the stories of stories of second-generation Cambodian immigrants to California who live in the shadow of their Khmer parents’ experience of the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s. Finally, on the meta end, Tom Conaghan’s edited collection Reverse Engineering reprints seven exceptional modern short stories and pairs them with commentary from their authors. My favourite: Mahreen Sohail’s wonderful ‘Hair’.

I also read some brilliant speculative fiction and SFF. T. Kingfisher’s Nettle and Bone made me a confirmed fan of her work; a totally engrossing, original low fantasy that combines the darker, more serious folktale feel of a writer like Robin McKinley with the lightheartedness of Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Ellen Klages’s glittering novella Passing Strange transports the reader to the lesbian subculture of San Francisco in the 1940s, with just a hint of magic. Meanwhile, on the SF end, I just loved Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit, which had some problems but won me over with its joyful queer romance. (I’m now reading her second book set in the same universe, Ocean’s Echo, and it’s just as good so far!)

Non-fiction was also strong this year, especially memoir. Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim was a brilliant examination of human engagement with water throughout the world, from abalone divers to public pools. Catherine Cho’s Inferno, an account of her experience with postnatal psychosis, was emotionally resonant and beautifully written. Meanwhile, Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks is also an exploration of trauma, as well as Owusu’s experiences of feeling rootless, her race and identity read differently wherever she goes.

I always love a good campus novel and 2022 really delivered! Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir is a sharp, amoral character study of an English professor in her late fifties whose husband John has just been accused by his students of sexual assault. Elaine Hsieh Cho’s  Disorientation wasn’t perfect, but it’s still a brilliant satire, following Taiwanese-American PhD student Ingrid as she tries to finish her dissertation while nursing her rivalry with fellow grad student Vivian, an Asian lesbian activist who writes papers called things like ‘Still Thirsty: Why Boba Liberalism Will Not Save Us’. Finally, Lee Cole’s Groundskeeping eschews literary flashiness for slow meditation as it explores the relationship between Owen, who grew up in rural Kentucky and works as a groundskeeper at the local college, and Alma, a writer-in-residence and ‘cultural Muslim’ whose parents fled Bosnia before she was born.

I read fewer good crime and thriller novels this year, although I was delighted by the revival of horror tropes and full-blown horror novels. Ellery Lloyd’s The Club was probably my thriller of the year: set in the luxurious retreat of ‘Island Home’, it handles its twists realistically rather than sacrificing realism for shock value, which has been a problem for me with a lot of recent thrillers. Nicola Griffith’s The Blue Place is a literary thriller that I’d also class as thoroughly satisfying wish-fulfilment for lesbians: its unforgettable protagonist Aud Torvingen is a former police lieutenant, six-foot tall martial arts practitioner, carpenter and social manipulator. Meanwhile, in horror, I devoured Mira Grant’s Into The Drowning Deep, a schlocky novel about killer mermaids that features an especially memorable set-piece when a Deaf character pilots a bespoke submarine into the Challenger Deep.

Women’s fiction, romance and YA are not my favourite genres, but I had a few hits this year. Queer YA really delivered for me, and I was delighted to find novels that focused on lesbian or bi girls, having read so many about gay boys: my two favourites were Rachael Lippincott’s and Alyson Derrick’s She Gets The Girl and Adiba Jaigirdar’s The Henna Wars, which both set up a pair of girls as sworn enemies and let us watch them fall in love while navigating cultural difference. In women’s fiction, Taylor Jenkins Reid made a comeback for me with her latest, Carrie Soto Is Back: I LOVED star tennis player Carrie and how the novel unambiguously let women be successful without punishing them.

Biggest Disappointments

Even though 2022 was a great reading year, I actually had more big disappointments than usual. Maybe this makes sense: with so many books to be excited about, it was inevitable that some of them would fall short.

By ‘biggest disappointments’ I don’t mean that these were my worst books of the year, but that they were books I’d been looking forward to, that had been hyped by publishers/reviewers/friends/all of the above, and which fell well short of my expectations.

There were a few big SFF releases that disappointed me (though I didn’t always get to these as soon as they were released). I was SO excited about RF Kuang’s Babel, but although I found it a fun read, the characterisation was weak, the critique of colonialism heavy-handed and the worldbuilding hopelessly illogical. Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne, on the other hand, which was also on my 2022 reading list, had three wonderful female protagonists but a slow pace plus unconvincing romance meant that I won’t be continuing with the trilogy. Finally, Aliette de Bodard’s The Red Scholar’s Wake not only had a beautiful cover but promised sapphic romance between a pirate queen and a geeky mechanic: unfortunately, this book did not work for me on any level.

I was disappointed (as ever!) by some new releases from authors I’ve loved in the past. Emily St John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility was a quick, enjoyable read, but felt very much like a literary writer trying out bad SF than the truly good SF that I know Mandel is capable of writing. Emma Donoghue’s Haven is the first book I’ve ever read from her that I thought wasn’t worth reading: this tale of three monks founding a refuge from the world on Skellig Michael in the seventh century relied on caricatures of dogmatic faith, and also threw intersex people under the bus.

Finally, I was disappointed by Tice Cin’s Keeping The House – the blurb was so enticing but didn’t seem to relate to the actual book, and the writing was too convoluted – ditto Morowa Yejidé’s Creatures of Passage. And I hated Josie George’s A Still Life, where I was left only with the overriding impression that George and I would not get on.

I’ll be back tomorrow with my Top Ten Books of 2022!

#NovellasInNovember: Patchett, Brooks, Fernández

I’m obsessed with Ann Patchett’s non-fiction, so I splashed out on What Now? even though it’s really no more than an essay padded out with inspirational Instagram-like black and white images that don’t feel like Patchett at all. This mini-book is an expanded version of Patchett’s commencement address at Sarah Lawrence, her alma mater (having attended a lot of UK graduations in my role as an academic, I can’t imagine having someone like Patchett come to speak to you rather than the usual miserable speeches we get!). Some of the material, like her time working as a waitress and as a line cook, will be familiar if you’ve read her earlier autobiographical essays and writings in Truth and Beauty and This Is The Story of a Happy Marriage. Still, I enjoyed her reflections on ‘what now?’ and how this question can be freeing as well as pressurising and terrifying. My favourite bit was actually the postscript when she explains how she wrote a boring, portentous speech first time around, then had to write it again after her mentor broke the news to her that it was awful…

Maud Martha, first published in 1953, is a modern classic, the only novel by acclaimed, Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. It follows the life of Maud Martha, a black girl growing up in inter-war Chicago, who moves from a relatively affluent family household to a smaller, more run down ‘kitchenette’ apartment when she marries. I had much the same problem with Maud Martha that I’ve had with other classics from black female writers from this period, such as Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); while I recognise the historical significance of these novels, and how groundbreaking they would have been at the time, they now feel narrow and cliched to me. (I don’t think this is a problem confined to black female writers, by the way! I struggle in general with inter-war and postwar English and American literature, and so I just haven’t picked up many books by white and/or male writers from these periods – these three texts have all been book club picks.)

Maud Martha tells a very familiar coming of age story of marriage, motherhood, colorism and racism. Brooks does a marvellous job of illuminating the inner consciousness, how we think and how we imbue what we see and observe with our own emotions. Her description of the birth of Maud Martha’s daughter Paulette is so vivid and immediate, as is an incident when the n-word is used at a black-owned beauty shop but the owner fails to call it out, to Maud Martha’s horror. It’s also obvious that Brooks was a brilliant poet; there are some absolutely perfect sentences here, like when Maud Martha muses on her general dissatisfaction with her marriage when she sees her husband dancing with another woman: ‘ “I could,” considered Maud Martha, “go over there and scratch her upsweep down. I could spit on her back”… But if the root was sour what business did she have up there hacking at a leaf?’ Nevertheless, these vignettes of human consciousness never seemed to me to belong to a specific person, to Maud Martha; the novella felt like a strung-together series of observations from Brooks plus some sociological background on Maud Martha’s life. In the introduction to this edition, Margo Jefferson makes much of Maud Martha’s teenage assertion ‘What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha’, suggesting that Maud Martha ‘cherishes her own mind, her sensibility… it is quietly extraordinary’ and that readers should ‘take nothing about this girl for granted’; but I found that Maud Martha very rarely took me by surprise.

This very short novella is told in chorus by a group of schoolfriends who were children during Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile in the 1980s, and are now adults who still feel bound together by the horrors of this time, and especially the uncertain fate of their classmate, Estrella González. Nona Fernández’s Space Invaders, translated by Natasha Wimmer, makes much of the familiar computer game that the children play, with the ranks of green aliens who continually advance symbolising the militaristic society they are growing up in. However, I preferred the parts of this novella that felt less certain, harder to interpret. Although they are scattered far apart, the friends – with González’s childhood crush, Zúñiga, gradually coming to the fore – believe that they meet each other in dreams, where they discuss what may have happened to González after she was abruptly taken out of school by her father, an officer in Pinochet’s regime. ‘We could take attendance… but it’s not necessary. We’re all here. We were scheduled to meet here. We’ve risen from our sheets and mattresses scattered around the city to arrive precisely on time. As always, the dream summons us.’ Maybe this is just Zúñiga’s way of dealing with his own trauma, but it makes the collective memories of the friends feel powerfully entangled. As ever with novellas, this just felt too brief to me, but I’m now keen to read Fernández’s recently translated novel, The Twilight Zone.

Have you read any novellas in November? Which were your favourites?

#SciFiMonth: How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? & The Red Scholar’s Wake

My experience with NK Jemisin’s short story collection How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? mirrored my experience with Jemisin’s writing as a whole, but definitely left me feeling keener to read more of her work. There were some stories here that did not work for me. Often, these were early tries at novels of hers that I have read and didn’t quite click with (‘Stone Hunger’/The Fifth Season) or novels of hers that I haven’t read and am now even more sure I won’t click with (‘The City Born Great’/The City We Became). A couple were as heavy-handed as her novella Emergency Skin – ‘The Ones Who Stay And Fight’, ‘Red Dirt Witch’; a couple others just felt silly and under-developed – ‘The Trojan Girl’, ‘Sinners, Saints, Dragons and Haints…’, ‘On The Banks of the River Lex’, ‘Henosis’.

Having said all that, though, there are twenty-two stories in this book and pretty much all the others were great. This is especially impressive because they span such a range of worlds and styles. A cook encounters a mysterious man who passes her magical recipes (‘L’Alchimista’); two women ally in an alternative version of early nineteenth-century New Orleans (‘The Effluent Engine’); a girl discovers why all the school valedictorians in her firewalled world are taken away from their community (‘Valedictorian’). Easily my favourite stories were the science fiction shorts, which feel like novels-in-a-bottle; I loved the chilling ‘The Brides of Heaven’, where an all-woman community struggles in a space colony after all the men die in a life-support unit malfunction, and ‘The Evaluators’, a first-contact story that reminded me of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things.

While I’ve only read one full-length novel by Jemisin, I definitely feel that she’s at her strongest when she’s creating interesting worlds, and at her weakest when she starts giving her stories simple messages. At her best, she somehow manages to tie together huge narratives in the space of thirty pages or so, never trailing off like I’ve seen so many short story writers do. I’m still not sure what I’ll pick up from her next – it’s a shame that all her longer works seem to be fantasy rather than science fiction, which works less well for me – but I’m open to recommendations.

I loved the cover and the premise and indeed, the title of Aliette de Bodard’s The Red Scholar’s Wake. Sadly, I did not love this book. The inciting incident struck me as very similar to that of Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit, which I also read this month. When Xích Si is captured by the Red Banner pirate fleet, she’s shocked when its leader, the sentient ship Rice Fish, proposes an offer of marriage; her previous wife, the Red Scholar, died in mysterious circumstances, and Rice Fish wants to draw on Xích Si’s technical expertise to work out what really happened. Xích Si and Rice Fish are divided by their views of the world: while Xích Si despises piracy and valorises her scavenger lifestyle, deploring the indentures used by the pirate alliance, Rice Fish argues that the haven she has built using the Red Banner offers a better way of living. Despite these differences, Xích Si and Rice Fish begin to fall for each other – but then an escalation of the political struggle within the pirate fleet threatens to tear them apart.

In my review of Winter’s Orbit, I suggested that it was really ‘romance with a side of science fiction’ and I think The Red Scholar’s Wake falls into that category as well, despite having more superficial SF trappings. de Bodard makes much of the sentient ships, the avatars that both ships and humans project and the bots they then use to interact with their environment, but unlike Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice trilogy, this book has nothing interesting to say about sentience, and indeed treats its ship and human characters exactly the same way. Similarly, there’s a gloss of Vietnamese culture that informs the world of this novel, but doesn’t ultimately make it any different from a standard SF setting. The political subplot is incredibly simplistic and predictable, making Winter’s Orbit look Machiavellian.

The problem is, then, that if The Red Scholar’s Wake is really a romance, it needs to be… romantic. And for me, the pairing didn’t work at all. Neither Xích Si nor Rice Fish are given much of a character past the different ethical stances that I described above. Because they have no personalities, there is nothing to draw them together, and yet they fall very quickly for each other. There also seems to be no consideration of the fact that ONE OF THEM IS A SHIP. I imagine de Bodard was trying to show that this kind of pairing is very normal in this world, but she needed to do more work to sell this to the reader (I found the ‘sex’ scene in the middle of the novel INCREDIBLY creepy). Reading this book actually made me reflect on why Winter’s Orbit worked so well, and why it might be a bit unfair to describe it as ‘romance with a side of science fiction’. While I was totally won over by the central pairing in that novel, the science fiction setting wasn’t merely a backdrop; Maxwell used some of the technologies she introduced to explore the trauma of an abusive relationship and how we can mend ourselves. In contrast, The Red Scholar’s Wake was definitely romance plus a bit of science fiction; the two aspects of the novel never speak to each other, and at some points (the aforementioned sex scene!!), are directly in conflict.

Note: After writing this, I found this excellent Goodreads review which picks up on the problematic representation of aromantic and asexual people in this book. This perfectly explains the unease I had around the way that Rice Fish’s relationship with her first wife was depicted, and why I didn’t find her trauma convincing.

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