Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2023: Demon Copperhead #LoveYourLibrary

I was absolutely certain I was going to hate Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. David Copperfield is very probably my least favourite novel of all time (I loathe Dickens, and it’s peak Dickens: idealised hero, massive misogyny, infuriating caricatures, stupidly large cast, incredible self-congratulatory ‘tackling’ of social issues, patronising moralism about poverty). Plus, although I think Kingsolver has written some incredible books (Flight Behaviour, Prodigal Summer) she does have a tendency to preach. This seemed like the worst combination possible, and I only picked this novel up in a fit of morbid curiosity.

Well, I had to think again, because Kingsolver-does-Dickens actually WORKS. How?

First, because of Demon. Every review of this novel has commented on its incredible narrative voice, and although I’m always a little wary of voice-led novels, which can so easily become gimmicky, this one is just fantastic. David C is reimagined here as a boy born to an addict mother in southern Appalachia, who grows up between a series of foster families and is ultimately drawn into drugs himself – there is a particular focus on the opioid crisis, as Kingsolver hammers home the exploitation of poor rural American communities by pharmaceutical companies. Demon is an irresistible narrator, and it’s he who pulls us through this book even when it DOES become too long and IS a bit preachy. On a line-by-line level, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Kingsolver write better prose, and she’s no slouch normally. I loved the way she followed the slight disconnection of Demon’s thoughts, as he returns to familiar refrains and picks up on fragments of words, looping through his own mind. ‘It was a Wednesday this all happened, which supposedly is the bad one. Full of woe etc.’ He’s also frequently very funny: ‘They stopped whooping and yelled at me that my friends were up ahead. Thanks, guys. I thought they might have raptured.’

Second, although Kingsolver does become too didactic at times – we’re told on at least four occasions about how awful it is that Americans stereotype rednecks and don’t care about rural poverty – this book does dig deep into questions of place and class that feel relatively fresh to me. It reminded me of Monica Potts’s memoir of growing up in rural Arkansas, The Forgotten Girls, which examines why life expectancy has declined so quickly for the least educated white Americans, who often live in rural areas. The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton attribute these early deaths to drug overdoses, suicides and alcoholism, calling them ‘deaths of despair’. The emotional realities of living in such a community are completely evoked by Demon Copperhead. The book occasionally strays a little too close to misery porn for my tastes, but these moments are rare; Kingsolver is adept at picking herself up again and rendering the complexities of Demon’s world, rather than allowing him and his neighbours to collapse into a pitiful mass.

Demon Copperhead also brilliantly reinvents Dickens’ painfully stereotyped secondary cast. I honestly think it has helped me understand what Dickens was trying to do with characters like the Micawbers and Uriah Heep, whom I can’t think about without wincing. Kingsolver’s cast retains the essence of Dickens’s but is so much more real and complicated. I particularly loved what she does with the female characters: Dori (Dora), Angus (Agnes) and Emmy (Little Em’ly – cannot type that without cringing). However, she also does a beautiful job on Fast Forward (Steerforth), capturing his dangerous magnetism, and Tommy Traddles, whom she manages to render as essentially good without making him simply a two-dimensional moral exemplar – such a difficult thing for a writer to pull off. The problems with Demon Copperhead’s cast are the fault of David Copperfield – there are just too many characters, and if I were Kingsolver, I’d have been tempted to cut tertiary figures such as Mouse. This adds to the sense that the book is just too long and self-indulgent in places, as well.

Nevertheless, what Kingsolver has managed to do here is to recreate the remarkable, immersive narrative pull of the best of nineteenth-century fiction. This isn’t my favourite novel on the Women’s Prize shortlist or longlist, but it would be a worthy winner.

I borrowed this book from my local library #LoveYourLibrary

‘Deaths of despair’: The Forgotten Girls by Monica Potts

In his classic historical text The Making of the English Working Class (1963), EP Thompson famously argued that the rise of Methodism from the eighteenth century onwards represented a ‘chiliasm of despair’: it allowed working-class people to accept their subordination to industrial capitalism by encouraging them to focus on the promised life beyond death. Historians have since challenged Thompson’s interpretation, pointing out that Methodism fostered vibrant community life and could actually be linked to political radicalism, not passive acceptance of one’s lot. However, I couldn’t help thinking of the ‘chiliasm of despair’ when I read the opening of Monica Potts’s The Forgotten Girls, which seeks to understand why life expectancy declined so rapidly for the least educated white Americans, especially white women, between 2014 and 2017. As Potts tells us, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton attribute these early deaths to drug overdoses, suicides and alcoholism. They call them ‘deaths of despair’.

Like Thompson, Potts argues that despair is closely linked to evangelical religion. ‘In some ways, Christians have been waiting two thousand years for the world to end,’ she says, writing of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in her rural Arkansas hometown of Clinton, although the biggest religious group there were the Southern Baptists, another evangelical denomination. ‘Poor white people with the least education, who live in areas with high concentrations of evangelical Protestants, are the ones who are dying young’, Potts argues. But are apocalyptic beliefs cause or consequence of these difficult lives? Potts comes down, mostly, on the side of cause: ‘People went to churches that preached heaven as the ultimate reward… earth was just a temporary place… If that’s the case, why struggle to make the world better? Better to concentrate on one’s faith… the responsibility to escape into heaven belongs to each individual person.’ Potts blames evangelical Christianity for structural misogyny, a lack of community, and a focus on blaming the individual rather than thinking about wider social problems.

Like the ‘chiliasm of despair’ chapter in The Making of the English Working Class, this kind of explanation is seductive, especially if you’re not religious or belong to a very different kind of faith. But are things really this simple? Potts suggests she wants to complicate these sociological narratives by telling the story of two girls: herself, and her best friend Darci. Both grew up in Clinton in the 1980s and 1990s, and came from very similar socio-economic backgrounds, but they ended up taking very different paths. Potts ended up getting her degree from Bryn Mawr and is now a senior politics reporter at FiveThirtyEight; Darci lost custody of her two children to her mother and cycled through a series of spells in prison because of her drug addictions. Both girls were desperate to get out of Clinton as teenagers, but while Potts has lived in DC and New York, Darci never moved more than fifteen minutes from the town.

For me, the problem is that Darci’s story doesn’t really change the narrative that Potts presents us with at the very start of this book. Often it seems that she’s just using Darci as an example of the wider trends she’s observed rather than really embracing her complexity as a human being. While I wouldn’t deny the harmful impact of this kind of evangelical Christianity alongside the generational poverty experienced by rural Americans, The Forgotten Girls sometimes seems to be preaching that there’s only one right way to live: get your high school diploma, go to college, get out, and make sure you don’t have kids until your thirties. Potts touches on the reasons that people don’t want to leave their rural communities – the need to support their families, the ties of land, the value and status that women receive when they become mothers early – but she ultimately says little about this. There’s a sense that we just need to work out how to keep girls like Darci in education, and everything will be OK. Having gone to a school where many of my classmates rejected formal education for very sensible reasons – and where some of them ended up becoming teenage mothers – I don’t think it’s that easy.

The missing story in The Forgotten Girls is not only Darci’s but Monica’s. Potts tells us a bit about her life when she was still a teenager in Clinton, but once she leaves, she vanishes from the book, becoming the observing sociologist rather than the subject. This not only feels unfair on Darci but shortchanges the reader. We need to know how Monica has lived her life, as well. Why does she choose to return to live in Clinton in the end? What draws her back? Instead, The Forgotten Girls tells us an all-too-familiar story about rural poverty, and never really plumbs the depths.

I received a free proof copy of this book from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 18th April.

 

March Superlatives, 2023

Here we go again! Quite a positive bunch of Superlatives this time round…

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks. Set at the dawn of the Thatcher era, this follows a young British-Jamaican woman, Yemaye, as she raves in dub reggae clubs and encounters the hard side of the British state she calls ‘Babylon’. This isn’t a perfect novel, but if it was, it probably wouldn’t be as good. I’d love to see this win the Women’s Prize. My full review is here. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… And Put Away Childish Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This is the third in a thematically-linked set of three novellas by Tchaikovsky published in the UK by Rebellion Publishing; I liked the first, Walking to Aldebaran, so I thought I would try this one. And Put Away Childish Things is a portal fantasy where a man stumbles into the world of the beloved children’s series his grandmother wrote (think Narnia) and encounters unexpected horrors. To be honest, I wouldn’t have picked up a book with this blurb if it wasn’t by Tchaikovsky, whom I also know and admire from his Children of Time trilogy. I adore the idea of stumbling into an imaginary world that’s come alive but have found that the execution never works for me. People always seem to end up in the tweest of children’s literature rather than entering the genuinely frightening and original landscapes that characterise many children’s books. The whole thing feels silly to me when I want it to be scary. Sadly, And Put Away Childish Things falls into exactly the same traps. Probably a Just Not for Me rather than a novella that’s objectively bad, but I would love to see a writer properly and seriously explore the imaginative spaces of childhood. I received a free proof copy of this novella from the publisher for review.

The Best Book About Siblinghood I Read This Month Was…

… Homesick by Jennifer Croft. Amy and Zoe grow up in their own world, homeschooled after Zoe develops a brain tumour, constructing their own universe of shared references, words and games. But when Amy leaves for college at fifteen after a sudden tragedy, the sisters’ childhood abruptly comes to an end. Homesick was first published in Spanish as Serpientes y escaleras (Snakes and Ladders) before being published in the US in 2019 by Unnamed Press as a memoir with photographs and then published in the UK in 2022 by Charco Press in this novel-form with no images. And the first half of this text, where we are also bound by the tight limitations of Amy and Zoe’s early years, is mesmerising. It’s remarkably elevated from the many novels that touch on sisterhood and growing up: I think because of the serious, concentrated attention that Croft gives to the girls’ experiences, refusing to sentimentalise or to slip into cliches about childhood or about ‘opposite’ or competing siblings. It resonated deeply with me as somebody who was only homeschooled for a very short time in my childhood, but nevertheless grew up very close to my younger sister after moving from the US to Britain, uprooted from all our friends and cultural references, and then ending up living in a pretty rural location. While I was reading this first half, I was sure this was going to be a five-star read for me. It’s a shame, therefore, that it peters out somewhat in the second half, feeling thinner and rushed after the slow, intense build of the sections that focus on childhood, and I didn’t feel that Croft quite tied everything together thematically.  Still, probably the best thing I’ve read on this kind of siblinghood. This novel has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023. I borrowed it from the library #LoveYourLibrary

My Best Reread This Month Was…

… Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, which I first read in 2003 (when I was Griet’s age at the start of the novel, ouch) and re-read again in 2004 and 2011. This re-read was inspired by visiting the Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam and finally seeing ‘Girl With A Pearl Earring’ in real life. I’ve always found Chevalier a bit hit-and-miss, but for my money this is a really good novel, easily her best. It’s so interesting that she wrote it in a compressed time-frame because she was pregnant; the straightforward, elegant narrative works so well, and makes Griet’s narration so convincing. This time round, I found myself reflecting on how many ‘rules’ of fiction this hugely successful novel breaks. Most obviously, Griet is an almost entirely passive protagonist. She has little agency and her actions don’t drive the story forward. Chevalier does pick up on some quiet moments when Griet’s decision to share an observation with Vermeer is significant, but these are limited. But Griet works so well for me as a character precisely because of her lack of agency. First, it’s realistic; second, it makes her much more sympathetic, as we see how she’s caught between the demands of her different employers. She has no wish to risk her place as a maid, a key source of income for her family, but she has no choice. I’ve also always loved the melancholy ending.

The Best SF Novel I Read This Month Was…

… Frontier by Grace Curtis. This satisfyingly strange debut novel augments its SF setting with western vibes. It opens when an escape pod crashes into the parched landscape of a future Earth, and our protagonist steps out into an unfamiliar land. As she searches for a way to communicate with Noelle, the lover she left behind, she encounters drug-carrying tortoises, threatening saints, complex barter systems and apartments built within the ruins of an old spaceship. Curtis constructs the novel through a series of vignettes, and we often see our protagonist through the eyes of other characters. This kind of quest narrative rarely works for me, but it does here because Curtis uses it as a way of letting us walk through the world she’s created, and explore the different societies people have built up since the vast majority of the population left Earth. Despite the devastation caused by climate change and the presence of fundamentalist religion, Frontier feels bright and fun rather than grim: Curtis enjoys playing with western tropes, and the focus is on how we rebuild rather than on how we destroy. It’s the atmosphere of this world that will remain with me rather than the specifics of the story, but I look forward to whatever Curtis writes next. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Best Book Set In A Convent I Read This Month Was…

… The Book of Eve by Meg Clothier. As you may know, I am a big fan of novels set in convents. This one is a quasi-historical novel set in a version of Renaissance Florence, though it’s difficult to pin down precisely – the book at the centre of the novel is inspired by the fifteenth-century Voynich manuscript, but the story and setting also reminded me strongly of Sarah Dunant’s Sacred Hearts, set in a late sixteenth-century Ferrara convent. Like Bridget Collins’s The Binding, this is basically fantasy dressed up as history. This decision serves Clothier well, as she is able to infuse magic into her story almost imperceptibly at first. Our protagonist is Beatrice, the convent librarian, who comes across the titular book and gradually realises both that there is something strange about it and that other people want it very badly. But one of the strengths of Clothier’s novel – and something that often flourishes in a convent setting – is the way she develops the wider cast of convent sisters. Mother Chiara is especially vivid and interesting, but I also enjoyed many of the women who get less page-time, like Hildegard. For me, the first half of this novel was strongest, beautifully immersive. It became a little more familiar when the pace picks up, and we get a rather cartoonish religious villain. However, there’s just enough weirdness to stop it becoming too simplistically emancipatory. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Best Thriller I Read This Month Was…

… The Lost Night by Andrea Bartz. Lindsay’s best friend Edie killed herself in 2009; ten years on, Lindsay discovers an unsettling video that suggests that she might have been involved in Edie’s death, and given that she can’t remember chunks of that night, she doesn’t know how to prove otherwise. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t spend my early twenties in a Brooklyn party loft, but I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that’s so evocative of that particular life stage for millennials of my age. There are a ton of books about nostalgia for the late teens and university years, but Bartz is so good at capturing what’s particularly special and difficult about striking out on your own, when you think you’re really grown-up but are still a very young adult. Lindsay’s growing horror as she starts to doubt herself is gripping and disorientating, too. As ever with thrillers (Bartz’s We Were Never Here commits the same crime) this has a bit of a silly twist ending, but it’s worth reading for the central chunk of the story.

Did you have any stand-out reads this month? Anything you hated? Anything you loved?

November Superlatives Plus #NovellasInNovember #SciFiMonth Round-Up

A very short superlatives post this month because I’ve been focused on Novellas in November and SF Month! I’ve also included my summaries of both of these challenges at the bottom of this post.

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Passing Strange by Ellen Klages, a glittering lesbian novella set in 1940s San Francisco. You can read my full review here.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne. So, I knew this was going to be bad, but I didn’t know it would be quite THIS bad. My Goodreads review/rant is here.

The Thriller I Had The Most Mixed Feelings About This Month Was…

… Five Survive by Holly Jackson. This follows six friends who get into an RV for a long road trip from Philadelphia to the Gulf Coast, hoping to celebrate high school graduation. However, things go wrong when they break down in the middle of nowhere, none of their phones have any service, and they realise there’s a sniper shooting at them. One of them won’t survive the night… but which one? And why have they been targeted and held hostage?  In short: compelling thriller, incredibly irritating narrator. And why has it been saddled with a cover that makes it look like it’s one of the children’s mysteries I used to read as a kid? Readalike: Riley Sager’s silly but compelling Survive The Night. My full Goodreads review is here. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on December 8th.

My Favourite Reread This Month Was…

… The Galaxy, and The Ground Within by Becky Chambers. I read this final instalment of Chambers’s Wayfarers quartet a couple of years back, but it was a delight to return to it as part of the #SciFiMonth readalong, and I found the discussion questions from Lisa and Mayri helped me think more deeply about the novel. In particular, I focused on Pei’s character arc, which had been easily the most interesting section of the novel for me first time around but this time felt even more resonant.  Spoilers follow – if you want a spoiler-free review of this novel, here’s my original review. 

Pei is part of an alien species called the Aeluon, who organise their reproductive cycle rather differently than humans do. The Aeluon come in three sexes – male, female and shon, who can shift between the two. Females only incubate an egg once or twice in their reproductive lifetimes, and this is signalled by the ‘shimmer’, when their scales sparkle rainbow. As Aeluon society has developed, males and shon have come to do all the child-rearing, and this is respected as a professional skill, with prospective fathers listing their qualifications. Mothers, meanwhile, just need to have sex with the father/s while they’re shimmering, and then expel the fertilised egg. Aeluons are accustomed, therefore, to separating biological parenthood from those who actually bring you up, and collective child-rearing in creches is standard.

Pei’s dilemma in Galaxy is that she starts shimmering and realises that she really doesn’t want to take time out of her life to spend the required few weeks at a creche to fertilise and expel her egg. Aeluon society, because of its low fertility, really hammers home the message that this is a sacred duty for females, but Pei ultimately realises that there’s no problem with the Aeluon population these days* and she really doesn’t have to mother an egg if she doesn’t want to. Great, you might think: but when I first read Galaxy, I was incredibly frustrated with Pei’s decision. I always cheer on human women in fiction who don’t want to be mothers, but come on! This is the easiest sacred social duty to fulfil ever! Why wouldn’t you fit in with your society’s norms if you could do it so simply!

*though I really don’t understand how this species has survived, let alone thrived, as it is mathematically unable to reproduce itself – even if every female fertilised every egg they had and there was no embryo/infant/child loss – unless there are a great many more females than males or shon, and this is not implied

On a re-read, as I knew what Pei was going to decide ahead of time, I was able to respond more reflectively. Pei’s plot line made me realise, as someone who is childless by choice, how much I would like to be a mother if I lived in a completely different society. I have never felt any biological urge to have children, but I like the idea of being able to deeply invest in a relationship with my own children, although I do hugely value working with other people’s children as well. I would love to experience childrearing as a creative, satisfying and emotional project. However, unfortunately I have realised that in our current society, there’s no way I would have the time and space I’d need to give to a child to make this a fulfilling experience for me while still doing some of the other things that I most value (I am under no illusion that you can have a child and ‘have it all’, in any version of our world, and whether you are a man or a woman; child-rearing takes time, and so you are going to have less time for other things if you do it right). I don’t want to live a life where everything is crammed in, so cheap/free nursery provision, flexible working, supportive partner etc wouldn’t change my mind. On the other hand, I would adore being an Aeluon mother, or even potentially being an Aeluon father! By detaching these questions from our ideas of human sex/gender roles, Chambers gives us so much to think with. It’s a shame that I didn’t find the other character arcs in this book as thought-provoking.

***

A quick round-up for #SciFiMonth and #NovellasInNovember – my original plans are linked here:

• I read four wonderful speculative novellas. My least favourite of the four was Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Walking to Aldebaran, and it was still pretty good!
• I read two queer ‘romances with a side of science fiction’. While I loved Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit, I thought Aliette de Bodard’s The Red Scholar’s Wake left much to be desired.
• I loved much of NK Jemisin’s short story collection How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?, especially her SF shorts.
• I read three more novellas that (accidentally) spanned the range of the #NovellasInNovember challenge: one non-fiction, one classic, one contemporary/in translation. My favourite of the three was the last, Space Invaders by Nona Fernández.
• I am currently reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novel Children of Memory (good, some sections have a very different feel from the first two in the trilogy) and Zen Cho’s short story collection Spirits Abroad (amazing, adore the undead aunts).
• I am still planning to read Gwyneth Jones’s Life. I just had too many long, complicated SF novels to get through this month! This will be a December read.
• I am no longer planning to read Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath. Now this book has been published, there are a lot more reviews available, and I decided its fragmentary style and focus on surviving life on a decimated Earth weren’t really for me. I also worried that it might be a bit heavy-handed re social justice issues.

Did you read any SF or speculative fiction, or any novellas from any genre this month? What were your favourite and least favourite reads in November?

#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?

More R.I.P XVII Reviews #SpooktasticReads

I picked out some ‘mystery, suspense, thriller, dark fantasy, gothic, horror or supernatural’ reads for the R.I.P XVII challenge back at the end of September. This also doubles up with Spooktastic Reads, which runs from 19th to 31st October and focuses on dark fantasy.

What I’ve Been Reading

The book I was most excited about reading this month was definitely Naomi Novik’s The Golden Enclaves, the conclusion to her Scholomance trilogy. I don’t think I’ve looked forward to a book this much since the sixth Harry Potter book came out (sadly, I hated book six, so I didn’t anticipate book seven, which was good, since I hated it even more!). And while nothing can ever top A Deadly Education for me, this was probably on par with The Last Graduate, although I badly missed spending time in the Scholomance. Like The Last Graduate, the first half of The Golden Enclaves is rather slow and meandering, but it REALLY kicks into gear in the second half, with some satisfying character development and a return to the more complex moral questions that I missed in The Last Graduate. A great trilogy with an utterly superb first book that should be required reading for anyone who loves dark academia – or who has struggled with not being on the same wavelength as their classmates.

Sadly, despite it being another of my most-anticipated releases of 2022, I didn’t find RF Kuang’s Babel nearly as satisfying. You can read my full review here – plus a few thoughts about why Novik’s Scholomance trilogy is a much more interesting addition to the ‘dark academia’ sub-genre.

Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks also made my 2022 reading list because it promised ‘teen witch field hockey drama in the 1980s’ and it definitely delivered! Danvers High’s field hockey team of ten girls plus one token boy have never been very good at actually winning games. However, their luck reverses when they make a deal with the devil and start recording their bad deeds in a secret notebook, channelling their power not only to win every game they play but to achieve their own secret ambitions. Barry’s prose – or at least, the particular narrative voice she chose for this novel – takes a little getting used to. It’s deliberately dense with contemporary references, and skips between the collective voice of the team and the individual perspectives of its members, each of whom get a chapter of their own. It also skips back and forth in time rather disconcertingly. Having said that, this quixotic style is what makes We Ride Upon Sticks so distinctive, and I can’t imagine it being told in any other way. This isn’t the fast, feelgood read the pink cover might seem to promise, but I loved how subtly it dealt with feminism, race and queer/trans identity in the late 1980s, acknowledging that times have changed both for the better and for the worse.

(I also planned to read Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night for this challenge. I’m a third of the way through this behemoth and it’s going… slowly, despite some unforgettably terrifying set-pieces. I will review next month, if I finish it then!)

 What I’ve Been Watching

I was pleasantly surprised by Hocus Pocus 2, given that I’ve watched the original Hocus Pocus countless times since it first came out when I was a small child, and can recite most of the dialogue. Hocus Pocus 2 leans quite heavily on the original film, but also brings some excellent moments of its own (I loved the mini-arc where the jock character works out that he’s been ‘making fun of people’, the three child actors who had so carefully learnt all of the witches’ mannerisms, and the hoovers that save the day). What is perhaps most impressive is the way the film mostly preserves the original’s clever balance between spooky, funny and poignant, although the first Hocus Pocus is scarier and more atmospheric. The final scene with Winifred could have been sappy but was just weird and off-kilter enough to work for me – and, contrary to some reviewers, I didn’t feel that the three witches ceased to be bad guys – we’ve always known they care about each other and nobody else! Obviously not as great as the original film, but a fun and nostalgic coda.

What I’ve Been Reading and Watching

The release of the new Netflix adaptation of The Midnight Club inspired me to seek out the original Christopher Pike novel from 1994, which was one of my favourite books in my early teens. Pike was one of the big teen writers of the 1990s and early 00s, author of dozens of books which were sold to the same audience as Point Horror but which were much more gruesome, disturbing and original. I don’t remember very many of his books (I’m sure I read some of The Last Vampire and Remember Me series, I still own Chain Letter, and that I was so intensely freaked out by Magic Fire* that I couldn’t finish it). And until I picked it up this month, I hadn’t reread The Midnight Club in decades, suspecting I might find it silly and exploitative as an adult.

Well, I was wrong! I still love it! The Midnight Club packs such a powerful atmospheric punch as it follows a group of teens living in a hospice who tell each other stories every night as they are waiting to die. All the stories the characters tell are fully incorporated into the narrative, a narrative device that rarely works for me but which is brilliantly-handled here. Pike somehow manages to give each character a distinct storytelling style and to tell us stories that are not always good but are always interesting. Also, we can’t always neatly draw parallels between the stories and the characters’ lives, which makes the novel much richer, more interesting and more realistic (funnily enough, fiction isn’t always thinly-veiled autobiography). The spiritual aspects of the novel ought to be absurd, but because the book is genuinely moving and we really do care for the characters, it somehow manages to carry it. Pike is known for his horror novels, but this is less a horror novel (though the stories-within-the-story have horror elements) and more a haunting meditation on death. MOVE OVER FAULT IN OUR STARS AND YOUR MANY RIPOFFS.

*yes I did just spend too much time googling ‘Christopher Pike novel brains in vats’.

Soulmates Ilonka and Kevin share a moment.

So, how about The Midnight Club Netflix series? I’ve only watched half the series so far, so my thoughts may change, but here goes: It diverges from the novel immediately, and I wasn’t surprised, given how much of the original is about reincarnation and past-life regression. But I loved how it feels very much like a remix of the book, with references popping up when you least expect them. Anya (Ruth Codd)’s horror story incorporates an experience she had in real life in the original novel; Kevin (Igby Rigney) casually references the Louvre, having told an entire story centred around the museum in the book version. The original cast are all present and correct but several new characters are added, a choice that makes sense given this is obviously intended to be more than a one-season show, and we’re going to lose them all one by one.

As in the book, the different ‘voices’ of the storytellers are very cleverly handled. I especially liked the very first story, told by Natsuki (Aya Furukawa), which dissolves into chaos as she insists on jump-scaring her audience over and over again. I was less certain about the decision to add an overarching storyline about a mysterious cult that meets in the basement of the hospice; it just felt unnecessary to me, and it’s inevitably dragged out across the whole season, only allowed to advance by increments in each episode. However, I did like that Ilonka (Iman Benson) is drawn to the hospice because she reads about a girl who was miraculously cured after straying into the woods nearby; this is, again, another clever remix of Ilonka’s original storyline, where she spends most of the novel in denial about her prognosis, relying on herbs and healthy eating rather than pain medication. And while I miss the weird intensity of our original group of teenagers, this would also have been hard to translate to screen. Fingers crossed for the second half of the season!

Did you read any spooky books this October? Or watch anything scary?

R.I.P XVII Reading Plans

I’ve taken part in the R.I.P (Readers Imbibing Peril) Challenge once before. This challenge runs from 1st September to 31st October, and involves reading books classified as mystery, suspense, thriller, dark fantasy, gothic, horror or supernatural. So technically I’m a bit late to the game, but for me, these kind of books really belong to October, and I’m anticipating a few new acquisitions in these categories for my birthday at the end of the month!

I’m planning to read:

I am utterly obsessed with Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series, so much so that I have written several posts about it. The third in the trilogy, The Golden Enclaves, finally comes out on the 27th September, and I can’t wait! The Scholomance is perfect for the RIP challenge; it’s a magical school where the majority of its students never graduate, due to the very high death rate within its walls.

Keeping with the dark fantasy theme, I’ve asked for RF Kuang’s Babel for my birthday. I’ve been excited about this novel since I first heard about it, and I hope it doesn’t disappoint! Here’s the blurb: ‘Oxford, 1836. The city of dreaming spires. It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world. And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows. Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Babel seemed like paradise to Robin Swift. Until it became a prison… but can a student stand against an empire?’ One of my most anticipated novels of 2022.

While Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks is unlikely to be that dark, the witchy content makes it a perfect October read for me. NPR describes it as a ‘charming teen witchcraft-slash-field-hockey novel’. Set in 1989, a school hockey team’s luck changes when the girls ‘pledge themselves to the forces of eternal darkness’. Another from my 2022 reading list.

Finally, I have a proof of Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night from NetGalley, which spans ‘the brutal decades of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its aftermath’ but tells this story through an occult lens: ‘Gaspar is six years old when the Order first come for him. For years, they have exploited his father’s ability to commune with the dead and the demonic, presiding over macabre rituals where the unwanted and the disappeared are tortured and executed, sacrificed to the Darkness. Now they want a successor. Nothing will stop the Order, nothing is beyond them. Surrounded by horrors, can Gaspar break free?’ I’ve just finished Julianne Pachico’s The Anthill, which similarly uses horror tropes to explore the aftermath of Colombia’s traumatic history. I loved The Anthill and I hope I’ll love Our Share of Night as well.

In film and TV, I’m uneasily awaiting the release of Hocus Pocus 2, which comes out on my birthday. The original Hocus Pocus was one of the iconic films of my childhood, and my sister and I can probably quote most of the film. There’s no way the sequel can live up to it, but I hope it will be a fun and nostalgic watch.

Check out Elle’s R.I.P XVII reading list here.

Are you taking part in the R.I.P Challenge, or planning to read any darker books this October?

20 Books of Summer, #17: Room

This year, I’m doing 20 Books of Summer as a rereading challenge. I can read any twenty books I want as long as I have read them already! I’m on holiday and off-grid until 30th August, so my last couple of posts for this challenge are auto-scheduled.

L: My proof copy. R: The original hardback cover of the novel.

Before rereading: I read Room in 2010, as an ARC, so before the real hype around the novel began. Since reading Room, I’ve read and loved many of Donoghue’s other novels (Stir-Fry, Hood, The Sealed Letter, The Wonder, Akin, The Pull of the Stars) which has influenced my take on her as a writer. I’ve also seen the excellent film version of Room (2015), which helped me to engage with the novel as I could more clearly visualise what was happening. On one hand, Room is strikingly unrepresentative of Donoghue’s other work, which makes me think better of it; I can see how she was pushing boundaries here. On the other hand, I’ve become a little uncomfortable with the views on motherhood expressed in some of Donoghue’s later work, especially her short story ‘Halfway To Free’, which makes me approach it more warily than before. Finally, since first reading Room in 2010, I have become a historian of childhood; so obviously I’m going to have more thoughts about how it treats its child narrator than I did first time around!

When I first read Room, I wrote: ‘ “When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I’m five I know everything” Jack, the delightful narrator of Emma Donoghue’s new novel tells us. What he has discovered shortly after his fifth birthday is that the room in which he lives with his mother, ‘Ma’, is not in fact the entire world; there’s a world outside, and one day he and Ma might be able to escape… Jack’s voice is the most important thing about this novel, as being inside his head both simplifies the story, sometimes irritatingly, and also allows Donoghue to view the imprisonment in Room from an unexpected angle. Before reading this book, I thought that it might be very distressing and dark – in the vein of John Fowles’ The Collector – but although some of the details that we manage to work out don’t make for easy reading, the overall tone is far lighter than you might expect… I felt that this novel leant a little too hard on the exciting original concept, and on Jack’s skewed narration… and could have been a little better-plotted, especially in the latter half. But I would still very much recommend it.’

After rereading: So, I liked Room more the second time around. I found it intensely gripping, which was not quite my experience when I first read it. The first half of the novel is impressive. Donoghue handles Jack’s voice adeptly, and in the process, says much about being five years old in any place as well as in Room. It made me reflect on the push and pull about what we need as adults and what children need from us, a push and pull that is inevitable anywhere we live right now, let alone in somewhere like Room. Ma heroically constructs as normal as possible a life for Jack, which means that he is largely happy in Room; when they escape, he struggles with the adjustment to the outside world, pining for the objects he remembers. One particular exchange between him and Ma is both insignificant and horribly poignant, especially as the reader has only ‘seen’ the objects in Room through Jack’s uncritical eyes before:

Mine [hair] is back in ponytail but tangledy because there’s no Comb, we left him in Room. “You should have brung Comb,” I tell her.

“Brought,” she says. “Remember, I was in kind of a hurry to see you.”

“Yeah but we need it.”

“That old plastic comb with half its teeth snapped off? We need it like a hole in the head,” she says.

Jack also struggles, inevitably, with ever being apart from Ma, which means their needs are in direct conflict; Ma is desperate to get outside after seven years in confinement, whereas Jack finds the outside world terrifying. It’s a clever exploration of the tensions within the nuclear family, dialled up to eleven.

Having said this, it’s disappointing that the novel ultimately trails off. Donoghue doesn’t seem sure what to do with Ma and Jack after they are discharged from hospital. Jack’s voice, which worked so well in Room and in the immediate aftermath of their rescue, starts to become a little saccharine in the later stages of the novel, as he encounters more social norms: ‘In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time… In Room me and Ma had time for everything.’ I started to wonder if it might have worked better if Donoghue had switched from Jack’s voice to Ma’s in this final section, which would  have avoided this ‘innocent child reveals the truth of society’ cliche. Just as Jack was the right narrator in Room, giving us a backwards perspective on the horror of Ma’s imprisonment, Ma might have been the right narrator as they try to adjust to the outside world. For me, most of Donoghue’s other novels are stronger than this one, but it does have more to say about childhood than I originally thought.

My rating in 2010: ***1/2

My rating in 2022: ****

‘Is It Finished?’ and ‘Are You Happy With It?’: When I Grow Up: Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood

I’m on holiday and off-grid until the end of August. This post, and a couple of others, have been auto-scheduled.

Jacqueline Wilson, the 76-year-old bestselling children’s author, has little time for adulthood. ‘From the way you are speaking’, she tells Moya Sarner, when being interviewed for Sarner’s book When I Grow Up: Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood, ‘it’s as if… when you achieve adulthood, that is somehow the pinnacle, whereas I think that’s when you start to pretend.’ Wilson thinks that the people who seem most mature ‘have just learned how to pretend to be an adult’, and that children are refreshing because they tend not to participate in this pretence. Several of Sarner’s other interviewees also reject adulthood outright. 19-year-old Sam, a Nigerian immigrant to Britain, hopes never to be an adult despite having had to take on a great deal of responsibility; he sees adulthood as defined by self-imposed constraints, by the refusal to dream, and so by the inability to imagine radical social revolution. Most strikingly, very few of Sarner’s interviewees, from those in their late teens to those reaching the end of their lives, see themselves as truly ‘adult’. ‘I truly do not consider that I have grown up,’ says Pog, who has three adult children and was a full-time carer for her late husband. ‘And I’m 90.’

Like the concept of ‘adulthood’ itself, When I Grow Up is caught between contradictions, which are acutely frustrating in its earlier, shallower chapters and become more meaningful in the later, better sections of the book. As a historian of adulthood in Cold War Britain, I would contend that ‘adulthood’ is difficult to reclaim, despite Sarner’s efforts, because it serves two main societal purposes. One – the one that Sarner is really interested in – is the idea that adulthood is an individual attitude of mind, something that we may lose and regain throughout our lives, that isn’t better than other orientations towards the world, but just different. As psychoanalyst Josh Cohen suggests in conversation with Sarner, who is herself a psychodynamic psychotherapist, childhood and adulthood can be seen as different psychic states rather than developmental stages, and hence not positioned as part of a hierarchy. I love this idea, and very much resonate with the sense of being more and less ‘adult’ at different times of life.

However, as Sarner’s book unconsciously demonstrates, it’s difficult to use the idea of ‘adulthood’ in this way when it is so embedded in modern society as a way of dividing the deserving from the undeserving; the non-citizens from the citizens; the immature from the mature. Adulthood is hierarchical, by nature, because for there to be adults there have to be non-adults, who don’t possess the same rights, capabilities and competencies as adults. As Sarner says herself, adulthood is associated with independence from others, ‘mastery and competence’, care and thoughtfulness’, ‘responsibility’ and mature moral understanding. Sarner contests this definition later in the book, emphasising that, for example, dependence isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but fails to understand that the idea of the ‘dependent subject’ is encoded in the very idea of adulthood, as historians like Holly Brewer, Satadru Sen, Corinne Field, Nicholas Syrett and Ishita Pande have shown. The most obvious victims of hierarchical adulthood are children and young people, but it also targets disabled people, who may be seen as not fully grown-up because they may not be able to live independently, and other groups who don’t fit into white heterosexual middle-class male norms.  I, personally, would prefer to challenge the idea that ‘being an adult’ is meaningful rather than just trying to change what ‘being an adult’ means.

Nevertheless, the later chapters of Sarner’s book, where she more fully acknowledges that adulthood should not be a fixed goal to be achieved, contain much that is valuable. I loved the story she tells about a nursery manager who does not praise or criticise the paintings the children in her care produce but instead simply asks ‘Is it finished?’ and ‘Are you happy with it?’ Sarner suggests that this gives the picture back to the child – allowing the picture to stay in a child’s world of creation rather than in an adult world of aspiration and achievement. But as she implies, this attitude to one’s artistic work is also deeply mature – and, in my opinion, disconnected from chronological age. I was more able to occupy this headspace at 18 than I am now, at 35. Why not discard the idea of a set sequence of life stages altogether? This is kind of where Sarner gets to by the end of this book – but by not signalling this from the start, and by structuring her chapters around this familiar sequence, she undermines her own argument. Why insist that children must be protected from the world, that adolescents have to party and take risks, that adults should be ambitious, that middle-aged people should settle down, that the old are wise but obsolete? Why not let us all be people, some of whom need more or less help with their lives than other people?

RANDOM POSTSCRIPT FOR THOSE AGED 30-40: We are used to being told that the frontal lobes of our brain, which are responsible for executive functioning, don’t fully develop until 25 or even 30. HOWEVER, Sarner reveals that they then start declining after age 40! So, fellow 30-40 year olds, this is actually the only decade we get to be adults! Make the most of it!!!

If you want to read more about my own historical research on adulthood, check out the History and Publications tabs. I am currently working on an edited collection on adulthood in Britain and the United States since c. 1300 with fellow historian Maria Cannon, and a book on children and adolescents’ understandings of adulthood and chronological age in Cold War Britain, c.1945-1989.

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

#20 Books of Summer, #13 and #14: True Believer and Over Sea, Under Stone

This year, I’m doing 20 Books of Summer as a rereading challenge. I can read any twenty books I want as long as I have read them already!

I feel like a bit of a cheat choosing two children’s/YA books (Skellig did not count because it was so awful I read it very slowly) but, to be fair, nothing against it in the rules I set myself.

The UK edition I own – couldn’t find a stock photo online. I love the very ‘early 00s’ font choice, reminiscent of the cover of Nicola Griffiths’ The Blue Place.

Before rereading: I first read this book in 2002, when I was fifteen years old, the same age as the main character. I don’t remember much about it other than that I resonated with its themes of oppressive, evangelical Christianity and first love.  It stands out in my memory because I liked it despite the fact it was an ‘issue’ book written in blank verse – two things I usually steered clear of as a teenager. I didn’t write anything down about the novel at the time, but it was ‘Commended’ in my monthly book awards.

After rereading: Ah, I completely see why I loved this so much as a teenager, but I still really enjoyed it as an adult. The central themes of the novel – unrequited love, religion, and biochemistry – were also three of my obsessions at this age. Like LaVaughn, the protagonist of True Believer, I was disturbed by how many of my fellow classmates had become vocal evangelical Christians, committing to fundamentalist ideas about evolution and hellfire, and resisted their attempts to convert me. Although our adolescent experiences were otherwise very far apart – American LaVaughn lives in a rough inner city area with frequent shootings, both inside and outside her high school – I identified with her concerns. It also features a very early 00s take on adolescent homosexuality: our sympathetic, straight protagonist discovers that a male friend is gay and, after the initial shock, accepts it. It’s interesting how the few YA novels at the time that did tackle this topic often did it in this sidelong way (and totally unsurprising that the gay characters were always male). Passages from the book came back to me as I was reading, making me realise that they must have stayed with me ever since. And while I still struggle with novels written in blank verse, this, along with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, is a rare exception that works for me: Wolff uses verse so cleverly to convey the cadence of LaVaughn’s voice.

(This book is actually the second in a trilogy. I read the first, Make Lemonade, after reading this one and wasn’t too impressed with it. The third, This Full House, came out in 2009, when my teen years were over, and doesn’t seem to have got great reviews, so I’m hesitant to try it).

My rating in 2002: ****

My rating in 2022 (twenty years later 😲): ****

Before rereading: I read this book multiple times as a young child. The American edition suggests to me that I first read it in the States, so I was probably around six or seven (c.1993-4). I remember it as being quite similar to Enid Blyton, The Magician’s Nephew and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in its Cornish holiday setting, quest narrative and hint of something darker via the character of Great-Uncle Merry, who I remember as having a bit of a Gandalf vibe. I did not read the rest of the novels in The Dark Is Rising sequence until I was a teenager, and never clicked with them in the same way. I think it was a combination of not being a big fan of high/Arthurian fantasy and feeling resentful that there were (initially) so few connections between this book and the rest of the series.

I’m rereading this as part of Annabel’s Dark Is Rising Sequence Readalong #TDiR22.

After rereading: This took me back! I read it when I was so young I still believed all books somehow existed in the same world, so it’s muddled in my head with Weirdstone – which was published five years earlier, and with which it shares certain key similarities – and other children’s books I read that dealt with Cornish folklore. It starts off feeling very Blytonesque, as the three Drew children embark on their seaside holiday, but Cooper expertly weaves in a darker and more menacing thread as they find a mysterious map and search for the Grail, and the final revelation about Great-Uncle Merry confirms my dim memory of the novel. This was a perfect read for a sunny few days spent largely on the north-east coast – plus one misty morning.

Annabel asks:

1. We’re reading the book in prime holiday season. Does it successfully evoke the sense of adventure of childhood holidays at the seaside for you? YES – especially the sequence when the children explore a cave at low tide.
2. This novel was initially written in response to a competition to honour the memory of E. Nesbit, although it wasn’t actually entered for it. How well do you think Cooper achieves this? I find this a bit puzzling. I devoured many E. Nesbit books as a child – Five Children and It, The Story of the Amulet, The Story of The Treasure Seekers, The Wouldbegoods, The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Enchanted Castle (hated The Railway Children, sorry) – and this book doesn’t seem to owe much to Nesbit. As I’ve said, to me the obvious readalikes are Blyton and Garner. Over Sea, Under Stone recalls a world of ‘high’ magic linked to local legend, which doesn’t fit with the feel of the more prosaic magics in Nesbit’s books. The closest Nesbit novels are probably Treasure Seekers/Wouldbegoods, but there is no element of fantasy in those two, and they adopt a much more imaginative and interesting style of first-person narration than Over Sea, which is very straightforwardly told.
3. I can’t help comparing the Drew children to Narnia’s Pevensies. Barney would be Lucy, Simon would be Peter – does that make Jane Susan? What other parallels are there if any? I don’t remember the Narnia novels well enough to answer this, but I was interested by the way the three children are characterised. Although Cooper’s writing is far superior to Blyton’s, there are traces of familiar roles. Simon is the leader and protective older brother, Barney is the maverick younger brother and repository of random facts, and Jane is more caring, more easily frightened and more timid. Cooper is careful to have all three children contribute equally to the quest for the grail, but I was sorry to see Jane sometimes relegated to more traditionally feminine roles – for example, waiting for the boys outside the cave.
4. And what about the dog? How does Rufus compare with Tintin’s Snowy/Milou or Timmy in the Blyton’s Famous Five? I’m not really sure why there was a dog in this book – although he does a good line in alerting our protagonists to the presence of evil.

My rating c.1994: *****

My rating in 2022: ****