Three Reads About Female Revenge: Your Driver Is Waiting, Black Water Sister and The Bandit Queens

In the first half of March, I read three slightly satirical novels where women seek revenge: whether it’s by possessing their granddaughter, driving a taxi through a protest in pursuit of their faithless female lover, or banding together to murder their abusive husbands! Here are my thoughts:

Damani, a bisexual Sri Lankan woman, works for an app called RideShare, pocketing only a small amount of the fares the app charges her customers, while trying to care for her housebound mother who’s devastated after her father’s death. She observes the frequent protests in her American city (‘Tech Companies Demand The End of Climate Change’, ‘Jesus had two dads!’, ‘O-KKK BOOMER’) more as an obstruction that causes her to change her routes rather than as anything that might make her life better, preferring to hang out at the Doo Wop cafe with friends Steph, Toni and Shereef. Her two comforts are listening to online guru Dr Thelma Hermin Hesse and lifting weights: ‘people don’t treat me as they would someone who can lift a hundred pounds on a shitty day. They should treat me better.’ Damani is a funny, sharply indvidual and memorable narrator, and the first third of this book showcases her brilliantly.

It’s frustrating, then, that the rest of Priya Guns’s Your Driver Is Waiting is a bit of a mess. The narrative intensifies with the arrival of beautiful blonde Jolene, a white ‘ally’ who is clearly trouble from the start. Damani seems to be so blinded by lust that she can’t see this, but their relationship basically consists of having sex; it’s not clear why Damani is drawn to Jolene beyond this connection. Guns only gives them a few scenes together before Jolene does something unforgivable, as flagged in the blurb. This was a relief (because I wanted rid of Jolene) but means that her betrayal doesn’t really land with real emotional weight, because it was so obvious and we have no investment in their relationship. In short, the pacing is really off, and this feels like a chaotic early draft rather than a finished novel. Having said that, though, it’s still so much more memorable and engaging than many finished novels I’ve read – I adored the image of Damani chasing Jolene down in her taxi as Jolene clutches a We Need Love sign! I just wanted it to be even more because it had such potential.

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

I loved Zen Cho’s collection of short stories, Spirits Abroad, so much that my ghost-story-averse self was persuaded to pick up her latest novel, Black Water Sister, which starts when an American-Malaysian woman is suddenly addressed by the ghost of her grandmother. And I’m glad I did! I knew I’d adore the relationship between Jess and her Ah Ma from the very first sentence, when Ah Ma announces her presence by asking Jess ‘Does your mother know you’re a pengkid? [lesbian]’.  Ah Ma is very much in the mould of the formidable vampiric aunts from one of my favourite stories in Spirits Abroad, ‘The House of Aunts’: she’s not at all bothered by Jess’s sensible objections as she leads her on a crusade to stop a developer tearing down a temple. But as Jess becomes increasingly involved in this drama, she realises that Ah Ma has a personal stake as well as a spiritual one; her relationship with the developer, Ng Chee Hin, goes way back.

Cho manages to maintain an enviably difficult balance in Black Water Sister. It’s often very funny but also genuinely scary, especially when Jess encounters one of the angry temple gods, the titular Black Water Sister (Jess thinks there might be an interesting story behind her name – ‘ “She died where the temple is now, didn’t she? In a forest… Is it because of the turtle pond?”, but her uncle soon dispels that notion: “The temple is in Air Itam mah. Air Hiram is Malay, means –” “Black water.”) However, even while she handles both humour and terror, Cho keeps her characters feeling real. The relationship between Jess and her mom, who is horrified when she finds out what is going on (‘She can’t be a medium! She graduated from Harvard!’) is especially heartwarming, even as Jess struggles with hiding her sexuality from her parents. I found this balance impressive in Cho’s short stories, but it’s especially difficult to sustain at novel-length. I will say that I wasn’t quite sure, throughout, if I was loving Black Water Sister or simply liking it a lot; every chapter was great, but I didn’t always feel drawn back to the novel, and read it quite slowly. Nevertheless, I’m a confirmed Cho fan.

I was looking forward to Parini Shroff’s debut, The Bandit Queens, after reading this fab pitch: ‘For Geeta, life as a widow is more peaceful than life as a wife… Until the other wives in her village decide they want to be widows, too’. And having expressed my disappointment when I was only partway through it, it’s fair to point out that it does pick up in the final third. Just not enough to save it for me. I thought this would be a dark satire more akin to Your Driver Is Waiting and Black Water Sister, but on the whole, it’s a much more conventional novel with some satirical bits. The strongest and funniest scenes are when the women get together and execute (or argue over) their plans, but there isn’t a lot of this until well over halfway. And the tone is so uneven; The Bandit Queens lurches from satisfying silliness to long, worthy passages where Geeta reflects on patriarchy and misogyny.

Having said all this, though, the thing that really put me off this novel is that I just found it so unbelievable. It’s meant to be set in rural India but the characters sound like they live in America half the time. It also delivers familiar story tropes: kickass women, a cute dog, a romantic sub-plot. As Srivalli Rekha writes in her brilliant Goodreads review, The Bandit Queens sells ideas about a dirty, miserable India to a white Western audience at the same time as it gets quite a few things wrong. I’m reminded of Deepa Anappara’s useful reflections on writing a book about ‘a marginalised, vulnerable community in India’ ; Anappara was born in Kerala, but recognised that she hadn’t lived the same kind of life as her characters, and so trod with care when writing her debut. Shroff does not seem to have been nearly as reflective. This wouldn’t matter so much if the book had just run with its fun premise, but it definitely wants to be something more, and that’s where it falls down.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. Now longlisted for the Women’s Prize 2023.

How do you feel about this kind of social satire?

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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.

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.

 

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!

December Superlatives

An early Superlatives post as I always post my commendations/disappointments, top ten books of the year and next year’s reading plans at the end of December. If I read anything especially superb or terrible between now and then, I’ll find a way of recognising it in one of those posts!

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. This is the third in a loosely-linked sequence of autofiction that began with Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and continued with 10:04. Plotwise, this novel follows the protagonist of Atocha Station, Adam, during his high school years, alongside tracing the stories of his psychiatrist parents and his troubled classmate Darren. However, if you’ve read anything by Lerner, you’ll know it’s not about the plot. Lerner brilliantly dissects the construction of white male supremacy in the late 1990s United States, continually returning to these young men’s cleverness with language but inability to understand the emotion beneath their words, how they connect to the body. Adam is a master of ‘the spread’, a tactic used by competing debaters to fit as many arguments as possible into their allotted time by talking at the edge of intelligibility. In this way, they can defend whatever motion they need to, never thinking about what it actually means. His classmates appropriate African-American street slang because it sounds tough, shooting it back and forth at each other without understanding. His father Jonathan reflects that using psychological language often gets therapists and their patients no closer to recognising their feelings. The Topeka School is probably the most technically experimental of Lerner’s three novels, but it also has the most emotional and political resonance. Not an easy read, but I’m glad I finally picked it off my 2022 reading list.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… To Be A Trans Man by Ezra Woodger. Many of the individual testimonies from trans men and non-binary transmasculine people collected in this book were interesting, moving and thought-provoking, but I thought Woodger did a poor editorial job: the themes became repetitive and there was too much focus on relatively young interviewees who are urban influencers, activists or artists. My full review is here. I received a free proof copy of this book from the publisher for review.

The Book That Left Me The Most Weirdly Underwhelmed This Month Was…

… The School For Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan. This has had a lot of hype, and there’s been a glut of books about motherhood and sub-Handmaid’s Tale type dystopias recently (see also: Joanne Ramos’s The Farm, Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket), so my expectations were low. Oddly, The School for Good Mothers was much better than I thought it was going to be, and yet it still felt disappointing. Our protagonist is Frida, a Chinese-American woman who’s struggling with her toddler daughter Harriet since her husband left her. When Frida snaps and leaves Harriet alone in her apartment for two hours, she loses custody and is forced to enrol in a residential government programme for ‘bad mothers’, where robotic toddler dolls record her every move.

Chan is undoubtedly a good writer. The relationship between Frida and Harriet feels real, warm and individual, rather than a sketchy stand-in for any old mother-daughter relationship, and I really cared about the possibility of their reunion. Nevertheless, I kept thinking about another feminist dystopia when I was reading this book; Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours, where the protagonist, bizarrely, is called Freida (rendered freida). Only Ever Yours is a pitch-black nightmare of a book about the insane expectations placed on teenage girls, and Chan seems to be trying to do something similar for motherhood but doesn’t push it far enough. For all its creepy robots, the book often reads like a realistic prison drama – after all, poor women of colour, especially immigrant women, are routinely separated from their children right now. For me, it would have had more to say about our world if, like Only Ever Yours, it had been more obviously separate from reality, if Chan had amped everything up another notch and gone full-blown horror. As it is, I felt like The School For Good Mothers was telling me things I already knew.

The Most Disappointing Thriller I Read This Month Was…

… The Helpdesk by SA Dunphy. This started well. James is a tax lawyer who’s desperate to make partner, but his dreams hang in the balance when a vital report goes missing as he assists in a merger. Frantic, he calls the IT helpdesk, where a woman called Charlotte is able to recover the file. James is relieved and grateful, and feels a connection with Charlotte – a connection that’s renewed as things continue to go wrong with his system. I loved this premise, and the sections of the novel that dealt with James’s job were gripping. However, the book strays well away from its opening by introducing a subplot about James’s wife, Bella, a teacher at a prestigious private school, and her (highly implausible) unfinished PhD on aggressive behaviour by high-flying corporate businessmen. In the afterword, Dunphy says that he had originally intended to focus only on the helpdesk plot but found Bella’s voice so compelling that he had to work her more fully into the novel. For me, a tighter focus would have worked better, as the way the two strands are linked becomes increasingly silly, and less original than the opening of the novel. The plot also relies on what I think is a very cheap trick; first-person narrators who are not flagged as unreliable not telling the reader what they are actually doing or thinking, which sacrifices realism for the sake of a twist. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

My Most Reluctant DNF This Month Was…

… The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay, where I got about 100 pages in, or a third of the way through. I was reluctant to give up on this novel because I liked so much about it: principally, the narrator, Jean, an unfriendly alcoholic grandmother and unreliable wildlife park employee who’s who’s got herself ‘pretty much banned from the internet’ for posting conspiracy theories, but nevertheless has built a fiercely close relationship with granddaughter Kim. I was also interested to see what McKay, an expert on animal communication, would do with the premise of a virus that allows humans to understand animals. However, at the point where I gave up on the book, McKay didn’t seem to be doing as much with this idea as I’d hoped, other than presenting the bleak truth that humans struggle to deal with the bombardment of voices of other humans, let alone animals as well. Even so, I’m not quite sure why I found this book so unengaging; maybe I should have tried it when I was feeling less tired. Thanks very much to Rebecca for passing on her proof copy to me.

What reads stood out for you so far in December? What have been your favourite and least favourite books?

Two Californian Historical Novels: Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson & Frog Music by Emma Donoghue

These two long California-set historical novels were so meticulously researched and the stories of the characters so intensely intertwined with the environment they lived in that it felt as if their writers had resurrected little pieces of the past. Despite this, neither of them quite worked for me as fiction – though I’m glad to have read both! Here are my thoughts:

Ash Davidson’s debut novel, Damnation Spring, is set in the redwood groves in Del Norte County (“Nortay,” one of the locals mocks an outsider who visits to pronounce on the fate of the logging industry there, ‘It’s Del Nort. E’s silent, asshole’). It’s 1977, and Rich is an old-timer, felling trees for timber; his wife, Colleen, longs for another baby but keeps suffering miscarriages. It swiftly becomes apparent that the chemical sprays the logging company use to kill the brush are contaminating the community’s water supply and causing defects in unborn babies, as well as illness in children and adults. Moving away from traditional methods of sustained yield (‘not cutting faster than the forest could grow back‘) has also caused soil erosion. In short, Damnation Grove could be a case study for Suzanne Simard’s Finding The Mother Tree, and also recalls other big sagas of logger families like Michael Christie’s Greenwood as well as pesticide critiques like Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation and Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. Davidson places a neat conflict at the heart of her novel: Colleen wants the spraying to stop to protect her babies and those of her neighbours, but Rich needs the logging of the grove to continue so he can get clear-cuts through to a plot of timber he’s just bought, dreaming of felling the ‘big pumpkin’ redwoods that his father never could. And as the community realises their livelihood might be under threat from investors and environmental activists, tensions erupt.

This tidy hook makes Damnation Spring a bit formulaic and predictable, and yet it still never delivers the clash that its opening pages promise. This long novel treads water for a long time before we finally (about three hundred pages in) get to the crucial public hearing about the plans to harvest Damnation Grove. And even then, Rich and Colleen’s divisions sputter out somewhat – although I did appreciate Davidson’s commitment to making sure they both remain sympathetic. The novel feels unbalanced, with too much build-up and not enough time for these interesting questions about the rights of workers, parents, animals and trees to a place to play out. This all sounds like this was a straight fail for me, but actually I enjoyed much of Damnation Spring; I liked its immersive quality, its exploration of the daily lives and exceptional skill of loggers, and the way we take our slow, unhurried time to get to know these characters. The ending, picking up on a repetitive refrain throughout the novel, is smart and moving. I wouldn’t read this again, but it definitely provided the kind of reading experience I hope for from a historical doorstopper.

Thanks so much to Rebecca for passing on her proof copy of this novel to me!

If Damnation Spring is an evocative historical novel, Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music sticks so closely to the historical record that it probably has a claim to being creative non-fiction. It’s set almost exactly a hundred years earlier and some three hundred miles from Damnation Spring, in San Francisco during the heat wave of 1876. Blanche is an exotic dancer and sex worker, living with her lover Arthur and his companion Ernest after all three of them left the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris. She encounters the enigmatic Jenny Bonnet, a freewheeling frog-hunter who dresses in men’s clothes and rides a stolen bicycle. But when the novel opens, Jenny has just been shot dead in front of Blanche – and the rest of the story retraces their steps to ask why. Both Blanche and Jenny are arresting characters. While I didn’t like Blanche, exactly, I liked Donoghue’s bravery as she shows how circumstances have conspired to make her into a woman who ‘enjoys’ much of the sex she sells and a mother who neglects her baby. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel, even a historical one, which allows its protagonist to be such a bad mother by modern standards, and yet Donoghue’s portrayal of the poor bargains working-class parents made with baby farms rang true to me.

Donoghue perfectly evokes both the stifling heat in small lodgings in San Francisco’s Chinatown and the tension and fear surrounding the summer’s smallpox epidemic, which eventually leads to racist riots when the Chinese population are wrongly blamed. And, as her extensive author’s note demonstrates, almost all of the major characters and events in this story are true. Frog Music has some blisteringly bad Goodreads reviews, which I think are undeserved – I’ve read historical novels much duller and more info-dumpy than this one (and I loved the historical detail!) But it is probably fair to say that Donoghue’s story is rather too constrained by the facts, and she might have done better to allow herself more creative licence, especially as Blanche’s story piles one misfortune on top of another. I wanted more of Blanche and Jenny’s daring and less of the misery of baby farms, industrial schools and thieving rapists. True to history this might be, but it makes for less satisfying fiction. Nevertheless, with the sole exception of Haven, I’ve never read a Donoghue novel that I didn’t think was worthwhile, so I’m going to keep checking out her back catalogue. (Of her adult novels, the only ones I haven’t read are Slammerkin, Life Mask and Landing – anyone read any of those three? Would you recommend, if so?)

Thanks very much to my local library for selling this book to me for 50p #LoveYourLibrary

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?