Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2023: The Marriage Portrait #LoveYourLibrary

I was one of the readers who, as a long-time Maggie O’Farrell fan, was disappointed by Hamnet: I thought the characterisation was stale, the narrative familiar from many earlier historical novels set in the early modern period, and, most deadly of all, it didn’t really make me feel anything. The Marriage Portrait, therefore, O’Farrell’s version of the short life of the Italian noblewoman Lucrezia de’ Medici, rumoured murdered by her husband at fifteen in 1561, puts me in a somewhat difficult position. Intellectually I can see that it shares most of the faults of its predecessor, and yet I found it totally captivating.

The first thing to understand about The Marriage Portrait is that, in my opinion, it’s less a fictional response to the real biography of Lucrezia than a response to Robert Browning’s 1842 poem ‘My Last Duchess’. This for me explains O’Farrell’s decision to remove her novel somewhat from historical fact: she’s thinking of her Lucrezia as the foil to Browning’s depiction of Duke Alfonso, revealed through numerous small details such as the white mule that Lucrezia rides and the fact that O’Farrell, like Browning, imagines that she was strangled rather than poisoned. I’m not bothered about these discrepancies: as ever, when I read historical fiction, I’m interested in how the writer uses it to have a conversation with the past, and whether they are really inhabiting the earlier period or are just using it as window-dressing for an essentially modern story. The more history I read, the harder I find it to catch true ‘anachronism’: it’s so hard to say that something could never have happened. This is especially true in a novel like O’Farrell’s that deliberately (and wisely) adopts modern language to convey the feeling of being alive in the sixteenth century.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t criticise choices writers make about how to present the past to a modern audience, and there are problems with The Marriage Portrait. Like Hamnet, it stereotypes its secondary cast. Of course Lucrezia’s sisters are bitchy; of course Alfonso has one plain, tattling sister and one beautiful, reckless one; of course Lucrezia’s maid, Emilia, exists only to be loyal and useful to her. Lucrezia’s parents, Cosimo and Eleonora, do rather better, with O’Farrell touching on how different the dynamics of their marriage are compared to Lucrezia’s forced union, and showing how they simultaneously care about their daughter and cannot allow themselves to listen to her fears. But we get to see so very little of them. Moreover, there are dozens of historical novels (and indeed fantasy novels that draw on historical tropes) that tell this kind of story, about a young woman facing an arranged marriage, her wedding night, and the controlling abuse of her husband. There is absolutely nothing new here.

But having said that. Somehow O’Farrell makes this material fresh again. Somehow she so deeply inhabits Lucrezia’s psyche that even though she ought, like Agnes in Hamnet, to be a hopelessly uninteresting ‘strong female character’ inserted into a sixteenth-century setting, she becomes real beyond the annoying trappings of her archetype (loves painting and exploring, hates embroidery, check). O’Farrell finally manages to bring what’s so distinctive about her contemporary fiction to a historical novel. She gives herself time: she allows us to really live through the key moments of Lucrezia’s life with her. And yet, The Marriage Portrait remains riveting, as we’re drawn through it by a thread of dread, knowing the fate that Lucrezia is going to meet. All the emotional intensity that I didn’t find in Hamnet is so present here.

Should The Marriage Portrait win the Women’s Prize for Fiction? Definitely not. Is it worth reading, even if you didn’t like Hamnet? Definitely yes.

Thanks to the library for my copy of The Marriage Portrait, which I definitely didn’t want to buy in hardback #LoveYourLibrary.

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?

Trans Histories, Trans Lives

I read these two books in quick succession over the past few weeks: I had a lot of Thoughts about both of them, so I’ve put together shorter (though still long) summaries here then linked to my super long Goodreads reviews!

Ezra Woodger’s To Be A Trans Man is a short collection of interviews with trans men and non-binary transmasculine people; while some of his interviewees are people of colour and/or disabled people, almost all of them identify as artists, social media influencers and/or activists, and most of them are relatively young. This uniformity, coupled with a lack of editorial control by Woodger, makes this a much less interesting book than it should have been. As Woodger makes clear, trans men’s experiences are still rarely talked about, and myths about trans men abound; it’s so important that we understand the particular kinds of oppression that trans men and transmasculine people face.

One recurring theme is the idea of ‘male femininity’; a number of Woodger’s interviewees push back against the idea that being a trans man means conforming to stereotypical masculine norms, and yet they insightfully discuss how they often tried to fit into male stereotypes earlier in their transitions, believing this was the only way to be seen as a ‘real man’. Kasper sums this up as the idea that if ‘you’re a trans man… you have to give up every single feminine thing about yourself’ but emphasises the joy he feels when wearing elaborate makeup, arguing that his masculinity has always been flamboyant and camp. He also criticises ‘passing tips’: ‘they were all things like “don’t smile and don’t move out of the way of people in the street”. Be really mean to everybody and then everyone will think you’re a man’. Ironically, he suggests, it can be harder for trans men to play with masculinity, because they still feel they have to prove themselves. Having said this, I would have loved to see this theme explored more deeply, as the same point is repeated throughout a number of the interviews without Woodger delving any further. (I’m thinking of texts such as Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity and Finn Mackay’s work on butch/queer masculinities – I’d love to see similar work on ‘male femininity’.)

Unsurprisingly, the interviewees often have much to say about how gender expectations pigeonhole everyone, even people who are not trans. Leo, a disabled trans man, reflects that when they use their wheelchair, they are read as more gender ambiguous: ‘The fact that I’m in a more passive physical pose is enough for them to add up what they’re seeing to way over on the side of “probably a woman”‘. Charlie reflects on the benefits and harms of being ‘invisible’ as a trans man: ‘I am still very well aware of the fact that women get hassled on the street. When I have women friends talk to me about the kind of stuff that they have to put up with on a daily basis and it’s like, well, I just exist. I walk outside my house and I exist outside my house, and that’s the way it is.’ Woodger comments: ‘‘The invisibility that we experience has led to a significant disregard for our rights and the issues we face but is also a privilege in its own way.’ This recognition, however, linked to one of my frustrations with the book; that it pushes the idea of a cis/trans dichotomy, rather than recognising how everyone struggles with performing gender and living up to gender expectations. This is not to say that trans men’s particular experiences aren’t valuable here, but that the book as a whole risked setting up a new binary while claiming to break down barriers.

I received a free proof copy of this book from the publisher for review. My even longer review is on Goodreads!

The Public Universal Friend, depicted in an 1821 biography

Kit Heyam’s Before We Were Trans is a popular history that thinks about how we can find trans lives in the past. Heyam offers a series of case studies of what Heyam terms ‘trans history’ across the globe, from seventeenth-century West African female kings to contemporary South Asian hijra to figures like Jemima Wilkinson, who rose from their deathbed as the genderless Public Universal Friend in 1776 and preached Quaker ideology throughout the northwestern United States. Heyam’s definition of ‘trans history’ is ‘deliberately expansive’: he argues that trans history must include ‘people who’ve troubled the relationship between our bodies and how we live; people who’ve taken creative, critical approaches to gender binaries; people who’ve approached gender disruptively or messily.’

Heyam’s introduction to this book is extremely useful and insightful, making a number of key methodological points. These points are followed through in a couple of especially strong chapters. Heyam is careful to show that intersex histories, for example, should not simply be appropriated by trans people, talking through the example of Roberta Cowell, a British trans woman who had gender reassignment surgery in 1948. Cowell always claimed that she was really intersex rather than trans, and had ‘developed along the wrong lines‘. However, in order to support her own story, she relied on homophobic and transphobic tropes to present herself as a ‘real woman’. Another excellent chapter concerns the experiences of men who lived and performed as women in First World War internment camps. Heyam effectively uses these histories to show how many different motives people in the past might have had for gender non-conformity, whether it was to ‘legitimise’ homosexual attraction, to participate in music-hall traditions of drag, or to seize the opportunity to express their true gender.

This book, then, is almost more about the methodology of doing trans history than it is about trans history, and I had some problems with how Heyam’s approach played out in practice. For example, he sets up a false binary between simplistic histories of homosexuality that are focused solely on who you sleep with, and the more expansive trans history that he advocates. I like Heyam’s umbrella definition of trans history but it ignores the ways in which lesbian historians, in particular, have drawn on lesbian activism to present similarly expansive definitions of lesbian history that overlap with Heyam’s trans umbrella. Judith Bennett, for example, argues that by using the term ‘lesbian-like’, ‘we might incorporate into lesbian history sexual rebels, gender rebels, marriage-resisters, cross-dressers, singlewomen’. This draws on earlier activist ideas from groups like Radicalesbians who argued that lesbians are positioned in a specific way in relation to patriarchy; being a ‘lesbian’ is to step outside the acceptable boundaries of what it means to be a woman, and therefore to face the full force of patriarchal oppression, as well as making as the choice to orientate your energies towards other women rather than men. As historians, we might sometimes find ‘trans’ or ‘lesbian’ history to be a more useful umbrella term, but it’s not true that one is inclusive and one is not: they include different people.

Heyam argues that there is an emotional case for trans history; that it is important for trans people to see themselves in the past. ‘We’re… trying to reassure ourselves that our genders are real’. While I completely agree, I thought this book did treat some histories with less care than others, especially Global South and indigenous histories, and the histories of lesbians/wlw. (Heyam does reflect on the problems of white Western trans people appropriating terms like ‘two-spirit’, but then goes on to include these kind of histories in their book on trans history; there’s something not quite right here). In short, I’m totally behind Heyam’s ideas about trans history, but they don’t always play out convincingly in practice, and the book ends up sitting uneasily between popular history and academic theory.

I received a free proof copy of this book from the publisher for review. My even longer review is on Goodreads!

I had hoped to include Kristen Schilt’s Just One Of The Guys?: Transgender Men And The Persistence of Gender Inequality in this post, one of the books on my 2022 reading list. Unfortunately, although I’ve ordered it, it won’t arrive for a while! This academic book promises to examine, via interviews and ethnographies, how trans men are still subject to systemic gender inequality in the workplace: while ‘some transmen gain acceptance—and even privileges—by becoming “just one of the guys,”… some are coerced into working as women or marginalized for being openly transgender’. I think it will be a great counterpart to these two popular/non-academic books.

Have you read any non-fiction about trans histories or trans lives recently? Any recommendations?

October Superlatives

October superlatives already! You can also read my R.I.P XVII/Spooktastic Reads challenge round-up for this month.

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry. Teen witch field hockey drama in the 1980s! However, this evocative historical novel was also brilliant on how our perspectives on race, feminism and queer/trans identity have changed, not always for the better. My full review is here.

(Hon. mention: This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub, which gives its time-travel narrative somewhat short shrift due to some odd pacing choices, but which partly makes up for this by its beautiful, poignant depiction of the central father-daughter relationship.)

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… Patricia Wants To Cuddle by Samantha Allen. I hoped this short novel would be the right side of ridiculous, but unfortunately it was the wrong side of ridiculous. The finale of a Bachelor-style franchise is taking place on a remote island where a group of female hikers went missing decades ago. Unbeknownst to our Instagram-obsessed cast, a female Bigfoot is stalking the island, aided and abetted by a cult of lesbians. Doesn’t it sound engagingly weird? However, the execution was really off. The first two-thirds of the novel reads like a light thriller criticising social media, then the final third pairs gruesome horror with humour. There needed to be a much darker, more subversive undercurrent from the beginning to make this shift work. And while this book obviously wants to be queer and satirical, I still wasn’t a fan of the lesbian stereotypes which didn’t seem to do any interesting narrative work (the interspersed love letters were so cliched they were painful to read), and the cult of ‘Patricia’ needed a lot more page-time. A shame, because it has a good cover.

The Book That Was So Well-Written But Not Much Else This Month Was…

… The White Rock by Anna Hope. Hope’s fourth novel follows four unnamed narrators in four different time periods, travelling in the same area of Mexico: the Writer in 2020, the Singer in 1969, the Girl in 1907 and the Lieutenant in 1775. All of her novels have been well-written, but The White Rock is on another level. The strength of her writing here, however, helped me really pin down why it is that none of her novels have quite worked for me (I’ve also reviewed The Ballroom and Expectation). The quality of the prose is definitely there but the quality of the ideas is consistently lacking. These four narratives are linked by a sense of worlds that are ending, relationships with the environment that are being destroyed. However, Hope has little new to say about this; once you try and look past the prose, the story dissolves. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Only Book I Read From The Booker Longlist Before The Winner Was Announced Was…

… Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley. This debut novel made this year’s Booker longlist but not the shortlist, and, while I admired Mottley’s writing, I’m not sure I’d have even put it on the longlist. Kiara is a black teenage girl living in Oakland who turns to casual sex work when she and her brother are threatened with eviction from their rented apartment; things turn even darker when the local police pick her up and force her to have sex with them at regular ‘parties’. Kiara’s voice is convincing, with some fantastic sentences: ‘the boyfriend I had when I was fourteen and still trying to live out childhood’; ‘a series of tingles have coursed across my forehead like that feeling when you’re blindfolded, but your body feels the eyes’; ‘Mama wore wide-leg red pants to go fall in love with Daddy and kept them even after they tore at the seams.’ The prose also occasionally waterfalls into long, run-on sections that feel utterly authentic for this seventeen-year-old narrator. However, the story itself felt too familiar, and Mottley sometimes tells us what we should take from a scene rather than letting it speak for itself, as in the otherwise strong set-piece when Kiara and a friend go to a ‘funeral day’, taking food and clothes from a funeral parlour: ‘Funeral day is a reckoning, when we mimic thieves and really just find excuses for our tears’. Despite the excellent writing, therefore, I doubt Nightcrawling will stay with me.

The Best Essay Collection I Read This Month Was…

… Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller. This was on my 2022 reading list; it was also shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize and the 2022 Jhalak Prize. As Miller explains in the introduction, these essays ‘are about things I have withheld’, quoting the poet Dionne Brand: ‘I am a black woman speaking to a largely white audience… so that there are some things that I will say to you and some things that I won’t. And quite possibly the most important things will be the ones that I withhold.’  He writes so thoughtfully about racialisation – how society constructs racial categories to put people into – and especially well, perhaps surprisingly so, about white women, in essays like ‘Mr Brown, Mrs White and Ms Black’, ‘The Crimes That Haunt The Body’ and ‘The White Women and The Language of Bees’. As Miller demonstrates, we tend to think of ‘race’ and ‘racialisation’ only when we think of people of colour, but ‘white’ is a constructed category as well. And as a black man, he’s acutely aware of his own perspective – structurally advantaged by his sex but not by his race, although his queerness complicates things further. The book largely focuses upon Britain and Jamaica, Miller’s two home countries, plus a trip that he takes to Kenya, Ethiopia and Ghana, but speaks to experiences of racism elsewhere too. There were a few very short pieces here that felt a little less necessary, but otherwise this is an excellent, elegant and moving collection of essays.

The Best Novel About Ballet I Read This Month Was…

… They’re Going To Love You by Meg Howrey. I was enraptured by Howrey’s last novel, The Wanderers, a brilliantly dead-pan but richly thoughtful story that followed three astronauts training for a Mars mission in the Utah desert. They’re Going To Love You is a very different book. Carlisle trained as a ballet dancer in New York, relying heavily on the support of her father Robert and his long-term partner, James. In the wake of the 1980s AIDS crisis, she watched them both uneasily, reassured by their monogamy but haunted by the sudden deaths of young men they knew. The novel skips between Carlisle’s past and the present [c.2016], where we learn that Carlisle has been estranged from both Robert and James for nineteen years, after her father forbade her to contact them. Ballet has been served badly by fiction: most ballet novels I’ve read emphasise the tortured nature of the art and how masochistic you must be to want to devote your life to it. Howrey, a former professional dancer, presents a much more nuanced view. I doubt this will be memorable in the way that The Wanderers was, with Carlisle’s first-person voice already slipping from me. Nevertheless, it’s still all too rare to read a novel that stars an ambitious, childless woman who isn’t punished for her perversity. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 10th November. 

(Hon. mention: The Cranes Dance, Howrey’s first novel, which is much MORE about ballet than They’re Going To Love You is, and is also very much worth reading, but which I found a bit schematic in its depiction of the two Crane sisters.)

The Only Book In Translation I Read This Month Was…

… Saha by Cho Nam-Joo. This short novel introduces us to a city-state called Town where you belong to one of three levels of society: either you are a full Citizen, an ‘L2’ who’s licensed for up to two years to fulfil particular jobs, or a ‘Saha’, one of the social outcasts who lives in the high-rise Saha estates. But Saha feels caught between two narratives, two types of story. One follows Saha resident Jin-Kyung’s determination to get to the bottom of her brother’s disappearance after he’s falsely accused of murdering his girlfriend. The other skips around between the people who live in Saha and is organised by the numbers of the units they occupy. I think I understood what Nam-Joo was trying to do with this second narrative, and I liked the idea of bringing the Saha estates to life through the voices of this peripatetic community. But it strays back too often to Jin-Kyung, and the individuals often blur into a litany of suffering rather than strongly coming forward in their own right. I also struggled with the choppy transitions and sketchy writing, which often felt like an early draft. I was struck to see that this was translated by Jamie Chang, who also translated Kim Hye-Jin’s Concerning My Daughter – and I had exactly the same problems with the prose in that novella! So, this at least may be a translation issue, but I still didn’t feel that Nam-Joo really pulled off what she set out to achieve here. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 30th November. 

What were the best and worst books you read in October?

September Superlatives, Part 1

This got really long so I’ve split it into two posts!

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Anthill by Julianne Pachico. I loved Pachico’s linked short story collection The Lucky Ones, which focused on left-wing guerrilla groups in Colombia in the 1990s as seen through the eyes of one elite, expat school class. Her first novel is just as good. It follows Lina, who spent her early childhood in Medellín but left for England when she was eight. Lina’s returned to the city to reunite with childhood friend Mattias, who now runs a community centre for local children, the Anthill. She uncomfortably navigates her own privilege as she volunteers at the centre, desperate to insist that she’s not like the other volunteers – that she knows this city, she knows Mattias, she speaks fluent Spanish. Here, the novel reminded me of Nikita Lalwani’s brilliant, merciless The Village. However, The Anthill also keeps company with another kind of book that I love: like Violet Kupersmith’s Build Your House Around My Body, it uses horror tropes to explore a character’s and a country’s traumatic past. A fantastic novel that seems to have been very unfairly overlooked.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes by Eric LaRocca. This is a strange little book. It consists of one novella – ‘Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke’ and two short stories – ‘The Enchantment’ and ‘You’ll Find It’s Like That All Over’. The first and last stories in the collection felt like they had potential. In ‘Things Have Gotten Worse’, two women connect over email when one is trying to sell her grandmother’s antique apple peeler and develop a strange, swift obsession with each other. In ‘You’ll Find It’s Like That’, a man enters into a dangerously escalating series of bets with his neighbour.

Neither of these stories exactly worked for me – the first came too close to torture porn for shock value for my liking while the second felt too abrupt and abbreviated – but both have memorable images and phrases. In contrast, ‘The Enchantment’ was a bit of a mess; it starts with the arresting idea that the afterlife has been proven not to exist, but does nothing with that at all, choosing instead to focus on a couple grieving after their son commits suicide, an experience which seems like it would have been much the same regardless of belief in an afterlife. Finally, Eric LaRocca’s writing is consistently off-kilter and stilted; I thought this was a stylistic choice when reading ‘Things Have Gotten Worse’ but soon realised it wasn’t, which robbed that novella of some of what made it interesting as well. I received a free proof copy of this collection from the publisher for review.

The Best Historical Novel I Read This Month Was…

… People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. This novel’s central thread follows rare books specialist Hanna, who’s been asked to restore the famous Sarajevo Haggadah. However, the rest of the narrative functions as a series of interconnected short stories interspersed throughout Hanna’s story as she tracks the origins of the traces on the book: saltwater and wine marks, missing silver clasps, a butterfly wing, a white cat hair stained with dye. We move through the interconnected European histories of the three major Abrahamic religions, with a focus on the persecution of the Jews: from Sarajevo during the Second World War to Vienna in the 1890s to seventeenth-century Venice to Barcelona and Seville in the late fifteenth century. I struggled with the short modern sections but felt that the past came alive once we entered the early modern and medieval periods. Meanwhile, Hanna’s present-day voice is satisfyingly individual, caustic and critical, although I found the resolution to her difficult relationship with her mother rather too neat – I would have preferred a more complex reckoning with the past – and the romantic subplot felt unnecessary. I was impressed by Brooks’s Year of Wonders until its jump-the-shark ending, so I was glad to find that People of the Book was much more convincing. Next up: Brooks’s March. [Borrowed from my local library #LoveYourLibrary]

The Best Short Story Collection I Read This Month Was…

… Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So. This incredibly strong collection of short stories showcases So’s talent and underlines the tragedy of his early death; he died unexpectedly in 2020, before seeing it published. So achieves something very difficult in this collection, asking the same questions without becoming repetitive as he tells the 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. Stories like ‘The Shop’ and ‘We Would’ve Been Princes!’, which begin comically, inevitably circle round to this reckoning. For me, the strongest stories were the ones that moved a little further away from the young gay male narrators who dominate much of this collection – ‘Three Women Of Chuck’s Donuts’, ‘The Monks’, and ‘Generational Differences’ – not because So’s stories about young gay men’s experiences were not strong nor important, but because it was a joy to see him stretch himself. This reminded me of another short story collection I loved that combined a unity of theme with a multiplicity of voices, Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How To Pronounce Knife.

The Best Book On Death I Read This Month Was…

… And Finally by Henry Marsh. This short book chronicles Henry Marsh’s life after retiring from neurosurgery and being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, as he looks back on his career from the perspective that age and illness gives him. I’ve read Marsh’s two previous memoirs, Do No Harm and Admissions, and frankly I wouldn’t recommend this to anybody who hasn’t at least read Do No Harm; much of the poignancy here is lost if we don’t first encounter Marsh as a practicing surgeon. However, Marsh is typically (for him) and unusually (for most writers) honest about his experience of ageing and facing mortality, and that alone made And Finally worthwhile for me. I also liked his clear and compelling arguments for legalising assisted dying in the UK, a cause for which he is now campaigning. Alongside Paul Kalanithi and Atul Gawande, Marsh remains one of the best doctors-turned-writers I’ve read. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Part 2 coming soon!

August Superlatives

A nice short round-up this month as I’ve reviewed most of my reads for 20 Books of Summer already, and only new reads count for the purposes of my Superlatives posts.

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith. This, with its AMAZING late 90s cover, only confirmed that I will read anything Nicola Griffith writes. Billed as a thriller, this is actually a character study of Aud Torvingen: former police lieutenant, lesbian, six-foot tall martial arts practitioner, Norwegian-British-American, carpenter and social manipulator. From the first page I loved Aud and the way that Griffith writes about her world, from the humidity of Atlanta to the glacial lakes of the fjords. It’s the first in a trilogy and there’s a sense that Griffith is just getting going; the book really springs to life in its second half. However, we rarely meet fictional people like Aud, and that alone is enough to make me want to read the next two books. Arguably, she’s a bit larger than life, a bit wish-fulfilment-for-lesbians, but you know what, I love it: there are so many wish-fulfilment books for straight white men, especially in the crime/thriller space, and nobody cares. (I also love that the Italian edition is called Concrete Eyes). Not quite up there with Hild, Ammonite and Slow River, but still brilliant.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

…The Dark Between The Trees by Fiona Barnett. This novel had such potential. It’s told through alternating chapters set in two different time periods. A group of historians follow the trail of some seventeenth-century Parliamentarian soldiers who disappeared in Moresby Wood, now out of bounds to the general public. Both groups soon find that the woods are not what they seem; paths seem to rearrange themselves to direct them towards certain places, landmarks shift and go missing. So far, so Blair Witch. However, the poor writing robs the novel of any tension and the large cast are difficult to tell apart. There also seems to have been no real effort to portray an early modern mindset in the soldiers’ chapters (at one point, a character talks about the division between his ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ roles). My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Best YA Book/s I Read This Month Were…

….Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating and The Henna Wars, both by Adiba Jaigirdar. I think I’ve found the kind of YA novel I like, and it’s queer contemporary romance! (Though I also read Casey McQuiston’s I Kissed Shara Wheeler this month, which did not work well for me, and found Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper: Volume 3 a bit cheesy). These were two more adorable stories. Hani and Ishu is about two bisexual Bengali girls who start ‘fake dating’ each other at their Irish Catholic school, each for their own reasons, but then start falling for each other for real. The Henna Wars stars a lesbian Bangladeshi Muslim girl, Nishat, who is infuriated when Brazilian-Irish classmate, Flávia, steals her idea of launching a henna business.

Funnily enough, the first few chapters of Hani and Ishu (though not The Henna Wars) start out over-explaining everything, not just Bengali references, but Irish ones like ‘Leaving Cert’ – but then Jaigirdar drops this completely (except in conversations between the protagonists and their white friends, where explanations feel natural). She trusts the reader to come along with her, which I loved. For this reason, both The Henna Wars and Hani and Ishu feel more subtle and complex than many adult romance/women’s fiction novels I’ve read on similar subjects. The Henna Wars spells out Nishat’s frustrations about cultural appropriation a few too many times, but that was the only time it reminded me of more usual YA fare.

Jaigirdar beautifully portrays how much it means to Hani and Ishu to find each other, after years of being the only brown girls at an all-white school; however, she doesn’t ignore cultural difference. Hani, like Nishat, is a Bangladeshi Muslim; Ishu Indian and pretty secular, happy to swear and drink alcohol. Intergenerational dynamics are cleverly portrayed, too. Ishu’s ‘pushy’ parents are not driven by religion or conservatism but by ambition; Hani’s parents rarely go to the mosque until Hani becomes interested in Islam in her own right, and are totally accepting of her bisexuality. The Henna Wars, meanwhile, tells a different story about coming out in a Muslim family; Nishat’s parents are much more traditionally religious and struggle to come to terms with her being a lesbian. I adored the super-close relationship between Nishat and her younger sister Priti, though.

If I was to compare these two books, I think The Henna Wars is the stronger novel – I liked the more substantial plot-line and the more nuanced characterisation of Nishat’s classmates – but both are certainly worth reading.

The Best Historical Novel I Read This Month Was...

… The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. Erdrich’s Pulitzer-winning novel is set in 1953 and focuses on the Chippewa Council’s fight against House Concurrent Resolution 108, which ‘called for the eventual termination of all American Indian tribes, and the immediate termination of five tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band’. Her central character Thomas Wazhushk is based on her own grandfather; Thomas works shifts as a night watchman while protesting what was erroneously called the ‘Indian Emancipation Bill’, barely finding time to sleep. The other strand in the novel follows a young Chippewa woman called Pixie, who is figuring out her own life while searching for her lost sister. This is a solid and educational novel, but for me it never rose to the heights of Erdrich’s more complex The Sentence, which was much more evocatively and imaginatively narrated. This was more like The Round House, which I found both worthy and plodding – and I was disappointed by how much Pixie’s relatively cliched narrative dominated when I really wanted to know about Thomas’s campaign. Erdrich fans, which of her books should I read next?

The Saddest Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Dolphin House by Audrey Schulman, which is closely based on a real scientific scandal of the 1960s. A young white woman, Margaret Lovatt, lived with a male dolphin called Peter in a partly flooded house on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, hoping to teach him to communicate with humans by mimicking human language through his blowhole. Schulman presents a harrowing picture of research with dolphins in the 1960s, exploring both their innate capabilities and how little they’re understood by their human captors. Her fictional protagonist, Cora, is desperate to prevent the further exploitation of the dolphins she works with, but is ultimately unable to stop it.

This novel is so intelligent and so interesting that I’m struggling to work out why I didn’t really click with it as a work of fiction (it would have been brilliant as a long essay). the biggest problem for me was Cora herself. Schulman is so determined to rewrite Lovatt’s reputation that I think she goes a bit too far. Cora is continuously idealised, always right in every situation, always there to tell the reader what they should think. So as non-fiction, this is brilliant; as fiction, it’s a little lacking. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

Did you have any standout reads in August? What were the best and worst books you read?

 

Wolfson History Prize Blog Tour: Going To Church In Medieval England

I was delighted to be invited to take part in the blog tour for the Wolfson History Prize for the fourth year running. The Prize celebrates historical writing which ‘combines excellence in research with readability’ and you can see the full 2022 shortlist here. This year also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Prize.

The winner of the Prize will be announced on 22nd June 2022.

Today, I’m reviewing one of the shortlisted titles: Nicholas Orme’s Going To Church In Medieval England. Orme is Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University. His book is an ‘account of parish churches and their role in medieval communities, demonstrating the presence of religion at every point in a human life, from birth to coming of age, from marriage to death’.

When I was a history undergraduate studying both early modern religion and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century religious practice in Britain, I used to get horribly confused by the way English churches worked. What was the difference between a rector, a vicar and a curate? What was a glebe, a benefice or a prebend? In short, I needed this book. By exploring the history of the parish church from its earliest foundations, Orme clearly explains how the relationship between the church and its parishioners was structured, and how these older traditions survived the Reformation and the coming of Protestantism. Apart from one opening and one closing chapter, all the chapters of this book cover its full chronological span from the Anglo-Saxon period until the 1520s, focusing on themes like the staff of the church, the church building, and the liturgical day, week and year.

My favourite chapter in Going To Church In Medieval England was on ‘the congregation’. After the Religious Census of 1851, which showed that only 54% of the population of England and Wales attended any service on the day of the census, the Victorians were swept into a panic. Why had the working classes become so heathen? Orme demonstrates that, even in a period where you could be reported to a Church court for being persistently absent at church and be made to do public penance, many stayed away or attended only intermittently. Even when parishioners made it to church, they didn’t always behave well. People walked about the church, gossiped or quarrelled, or complained about the priest. Orme writes: ‘Resentment could be shown without words, as with one man who contemptuously washed his hands in the font and another who gave holy bread to his dog.’ Meanwhile, behaviours that we associate with attending a modern church service developed only gradually. Praying was done with the hands held up by the head with the palms open until the early thirteenth century, when people started to adopt the more familiar posture of joined palms by the breast. Standing up at certain points in the service only became meaningful when most worshippers were able to sit down, which was not possible in the early medieval church due to a lack of seating.

Orme writes simply and accessibly about a hugely complex historiography, and for that reason, this book works. Nevertheless, I think I’d expected something a bit different from Going To Church In Medieval England, which is ultimately a top-down, institutional history of the development of the English parish church. The title made me think it would have more to say about religious experience, which – bar the chapter on the congregation – is not the focus of this text. I was also surprised to see so little about doctrine or religious belief, a topic which I personally find fascinating. Orme hints at the development of English Catholicism across this period but largely chooses to steer clear of doctrinal arguments, which, for me, was disappointing.

I wasn’t convinced that Going to Church in Medieval England quite fulfilled the remit of the Wolfson Prize, as I’m not sure how attractive it would be to a general reader. Nevertheless, it will certainly be a useful reference text for those studying the history of the English parish church or exploring church buildings.

Be sure to check out the rest of the stops on the first week of this blog tour:

May Superlatives

Again, the Superlatives format is borrowed from Elle. I had nine NetGalley ARCs to read and review this month – eight of which have been done! – so this is very NetGalley heavy.

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard. I tend to struggle with nature-writing that also incorporates an element of memoir. I know Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun were big hits for others, but I found both unsatisfying; the only book in this sub-genre that has unequivocally worked for me was Alys Fowler’s Hidden Nature. So, this was an welcome surprise. Simard is now famous for her research on ‘how trees talk to each other’, but she spent decades trying to convince both the scientific and foresting communities that trees of different species share resources and information via an underground fungal network. There’s some harder science in this book than in most nature-writing, which is perhaps also why it worked better for me: I loved trying to remember A Level Biology while reading about carbon gradients, xylem and phloem, and trees acting as ‘sources’ or ‘sinks’. But Simard is also unexpectedly gifted at linking her scientific findings to her personal life in a way that could easily have been cheesy (we should all seek connection just like the trees!!!) but was actually heartfelt, moving and unforced.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… Someone In Time ed. Jonathan Strahan. This collection of short stories featuring ‘tales of time-crossed romance’ sounded right up my street, but was short on both time travel and romance. There were a couple of stories that I thought were really fantastic, but most of them failed to exploit the potential of time travel or write convincing relationships. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this collection from the publisher for review.

The Most Disappointing Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Murder Rule by Dervla McTiernan. I zipped through this standalone legal thriller but ultimately felt let down after loving McTiernan’s earlier Cormac Reilly novels, The Ruin and The Scholar. I liked the unusual set-up: law student Hannah starts working for the Innocence Project, a real-life US organisation that helps to exonerate wrongly convicted people, but she plans to secretly use her position to make sure one particular man remains in prison. Unfortunately, The Murder Rule became increasingly unbelievable as it went on, and it’s obvious that McTiernan is more comfortable writing about Ireland than the US. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

My Most Serendipitous Reading Location This Month Was…

… a deserted, cold bus stop late at night [picture does not show the actual stop], when reading Caitlin Starling’s space horror novel The Luminous Dead. This set-piece chiller sees a woman descend into a labyrinth of caves beneath the surface of a distant planet, locked into a full-body suit to avoid attracting the attention of monsters called Tunnellers, and only able to communicate with the outside world via a comms link to her unreliable boss. The Luminous Dead failed to capitalise on much of its potential (seriously, there’s so much more you could do with somebody wearing a suit they can’t remove that can be controlled from afar!) and left a lot of irritating loose ends. Nevertheless, it was still pretty creepy reading it in the dark.

The Best Thriller I Read This Month Was…

…The It Girl by Ruth Ware. Ware’s latest tells a relatively familiar story. Shy Hannah from the local comprehensive arrives at Oxford and becomes best friends with April, her glamorous and wealthy roommate. April starts dating their mutual friend Will, but Hannah harbours a secret crush on him. After April is murdered, Hannah is a key witness. There are a lot of thrillers set at Oxford, but The It Girl evokes the weirdness of its setting far better than most. The characterisation is also much more effective than in most ‘friends get involved in a murder’ thrillers, including Ware’s own One by One. Finally, Ware manages to pull off a great twist that’s more in the style of older crime novels than modern psychological thrillers, letting the reader figure out some of the mystery for themselves by giving us a classic locked-room murder. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 3rd August.

The Best Non-Fiction Book I Read This Month Was…

… Glitter by Nicole Seymour, one of the short books in the ‘Object Lessons‘ series, which thinks about the meanings and uses of glitter, and why it arouses such strong feelings of love and hate. A book of two halves for me: I loved the first half, which explored how glitter has been associated with children, women and queer people, and hence stigmatised as wasteful, annoying, frivolous and frustratingly persistent. Seymour shows how LGBT+ movements have reclaimed glitter through tactics such as ‘glitterbombing’, celebrating its silliness as part of a celebration of queer ‘pleasure politics’. Sadly, the last two chapters strayed away from this interesting historical and political material and focused more on a cultural analysis of glitter as product, looking at children’s entertainment and gimmicks such as ‘glitter beer’, which I found less convincing. Still worth reading though, and I’d be interested to know if anyone’s read any of the other titles from this series. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this book from the publisher for review.

The Best Far-Back-In-Time Historical Fiction I Read This Month Was*…

… The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. This novel focuses on the ‘dance plague’ in Strasbourg in 1518, when there was an outbreak of compulsive dancing that lasted for months. It looks at the dance plague from a sideways angle, as the book is narrated by Lisbet, a young married woman who lives outside Strasbourg and is struggling with recurrent pregnancy loss. My experience of reading The Dance Tree changed as the book went on. I found the first third captivating: Hargrave’s attention to the physical details of Lisbet’s life made her world feel real, and I loved the evocative, gentle accounts of her love for beekeeping and her visits to the ‘dance tree’, where she has hung ribbons as a memorial for her dead babies. It felt like a vastly more successful version of what Hannah Kent was aiming for in the opening of Devotion. Then, things went downhill a bit for me, although the rest of the novel was certainly not wholly disappointing. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

[*worded to exclude more contemporary historical novels like the 90s-set Carrie Soto Is Back!]

The Best YA Romance I Read This Month Was…

… She Gets The Girl, written by wife-and-wife writing duo Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick, which was such an adorable, uplifting read. Campus novel with lesbians, I’m sold. I’m not a big reader of YA romance, so I’m sure there are lots of others out there like this, but it strikes me that the really big-name queer YA books I’ve encountered – Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda, Leah on the Offbeat, Red, White and Royal Blue, Heartstopper – are all primarily about gay boys or bisexual teens. While I loved all the aforementioned reads, it was really special to find a book that unapologetically centres lesbians. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this book from the publisher for review.

The Book With The Best Cover I Read This Month Was…

… Boys Come First by Aaron Foley. I adore this cover; it’s such a loving rendition of the three protagonists of this Detroit-set novel, paying attention to their individual features rather than rendering them as generic Black men. It reminds me of some of the older covers on the children’s books I own from the eighties, when publishers actually paid artists to draw pictures based on the book rather than using stock images. Finally, it also strikes me that black men or men of colour so often appear on book covers looking sad, angry or under pressure; I think this cover feels so fresh partly because the protagonists look so happy. It’s a shame, then, that this cover doesn’t truly reflect the content of Boys Come First; it makes it look like a joyful YA read when it’s actually a much grimmer examination of the lives of gay Black men in their thirties facing up to the white-led gentrification of their home city. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Weirdest Book I Read This Month Was…

Imposter Syndrome by Kathy Wang. This was on my 2022 reading list; I was attracted by the idea of a corporate thriller starring Julia, a Russian intelligence agent in Silicon Valley, and Alice, a first-generation Chinese-American working at the same company. However, I’m just not sure what this book wanted to be. It flicks uneasily between satire and seriousness, and between thriller and social commentary. The narrators, other than Alice, are just bizarre. Props to Wang for trying something new, but it didn’t work for me. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

Did you have any stand-out reads in May?

New Year Superlatives

With apologies to Elle of Elle Thinks for borrowing her excellent Superlatives format.

Best Read of 2022 So Far…

…was Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which has all the intellectual clout of The Left Hand of Darkness but which I found much more accessible as science fiction. Its portrayal of the anarchist society of Anarres should be essential reading for those who wrongly think that anarchism is ‘everyone being allowed to do whatever they like and society descending into chaos’; it’s an incredibly ambitious attempt to work out what such a society might look like in practice, and how its people would think differently. My first five-star read of 2022.

Worst Read of 2022 So Far…

…was definitely Charlotte McConaghy’s Once There Were Wolves, which supposedly looks at the reintroduction of wolves into the Scottish Highlands but is instead dominated by cliched romance and gratituous abuse. My Goodreads rant review is here.

Most WTF Read of 2022 So Far...

… was, surprisingly, Hannah Kent’s Devotion, which started off treading very familiar ground but then went to some… unexpected places. My Goodreads review is here (spoilers are hidden). Maybe we can forgive it for its gorgeous coloured edges though? [Devotion is out in the UK on 3rd February].

Most Anticipated 2021 Release Read In 2022…

… was Nina Mingya Powles’s collection of essays Small Bodies of Water (such a stunning cover!); it won the Nan Shepherd Prize for writers currently under-represented in nature writing. Although the natural world is certainly a linking thread between these essays, there are other themes that I’d say are equally dominant: food – from honey pomelos to the Chinese tofu pudding dòufu huā – and the Mandarin language. I picked up this book because I wanted to read about swimming, so it’s unsurprising that I was most drawn to the essays that focus on water, such as ‘The Safe Zone’, ‘Ache’ and ‘We Are All Dreaming of Swimming Pools’. However, I also loved how Powles often chases a single thing through time and space, such as the kōwhai tree in ‘Where the Kōwhai Blooms’, connecting her experiences of living in Aotearoa, Shanghai and London.

Least Anticipated 2021 Prize Longlistee Read In 2022…

… was Raven Leilani’s Luster, which I decided not to read when I was shadowing the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction because ‘I still don’t want to read any more dysfunctional women being dysfunctional books’. Either I’ve had a long enough break from them or this one is better than most, because I liked it a lot more than I anticipated. It reminded me very strongly of Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, but I’d probably rank it more highly (which means it would have made my ideal Women’s Prize 2021 shortlist), largely because Edie is a more interesting protagonist than Ava. However, I still had issues with Luster; like many of my fellow bloggers, I loved Edie’s dark irony but found that her journey ended up in a much less interesting place than I’d anticipated at the start of the novel.

Our First Book Club Read of 2022…

… was Lot by Bryan Washington. Structurally, I found this difficult; it essentially consists of segments of a novella about a gay mixed-race (black and Latino) teenage boy, Nicolas, interspersed with short stories about people who live in the Houston neighbourhoods around him. Some of the individual short stories were absolutely brilliant in their own right; I loved ‘Peggy Park’, which brutally and efficiently traces the fates of an amateur baseball team, and ‘Waugh’, which explores the complicated relationship between a boy selling sex and the man who provides him with accommodation. However, because I know nothing about Houston and the book doesn’t fill in the gaps, I couldn’t situate any of these locations in relation to each other, so the communal voice of the city that I think Washington was going for didn’t come through for me.

I was also a little lost as to the queer themes running through the stories; Washington has said that he ‘wanted every narrative in Lot to have a queer character or queer component’ because of the lack of representation for queer people who ‘fall outside of a palette-cleansing, cis, white, queer narrative, with a certain brand of polished body’. He’s of course, absolutely right about this, and the protagonist’s narrative offers a powerful corrective to this dominant trope – but the queer characters in the short stories seem to fall into very similar moulds to Nicolas, all young men of colour who have casual sex with other men. It’s very much focused on sexuality as an act rather than an identity, and, partly because of this, it’s a very male take on queerness. For this reason, I didn’t think that Lot offered the diversity of queer experience that it promised.

January’s Biggest Talking Point…

… was definitely Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise, with reactions ranging from utter boredom to intellectual delight. My thoughts are here.

What were your favourite and least favourite reads in January? Any other books that stood out (for right or wrong reasons)?

2021 in Books: Commendations and Disappointments

As always, I won’t be posting my Top Ten Books of 2021 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 2021, not necessarily first published in 2021.

Highly Commended

 In prize lists, I loved Annabel Lyon’s Consent, which should have made the Women’s Prize shortlist – and Richard Powers’s Bewilderment, which did make the Booker Prize shortlist.

The new Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You, was massively overhyped, but it was easily my favourite Rooney so far – I loved her clever use of psychic distance, switching between an observer’s view of her characters to their innermost thoughts.

In science fiction and speculative fiction, I thought the writing team behind James S.A. Corey pulled off a hugely satisfying conclusion to The Expanse series with the final instalment, Leviathan Falls – this series stuttered a bit in the middle but the last three books were all great, and Corey effectively tied up all the loose ends while wisely leaving the ‘dark gods’ of the universe still mysterious. Tade Thompson’s Far From the Light of Heaven was a hugely inventive space-opera-cum-crime-thriller with touches of horror. Will Maclean’s The Apparition Phase was a brilliant ghost story, something that is almost impossible to achieve at novel-length. Finally, Nina Allan’s short story collection The Art of Space Travel showcased what I love best about her writing in haunting stories such as ‘Flying in the Face of God’, ‘Four Abstracts’ and ‘The Art of Space Travel’ itself.

In historical fiction, I was pleasantly surprised by Stacey Halls’s engaging Mrs England, which had one of the dreaded floral covers but actually featured a complex, sympathetic protagonist who works as a Norland nanny in Edwardian England. Meanwhile, everything this damning review says about Sarah Penner’s The Lost Apothecary is true (except that Cambridge does offer a masters degree in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies – that’s Cambridge being weird, not Penner!). Nevertheless, I found it irresistibly fun and gripping, so I guess I recommend it anyway, if you can deal with the terrible history?

Finally, in YA and YA-adjacent, I liked Angeline Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughter (one of my most anticipated reads of 2021) despite its pacing problems and tendency to spell things out for the reader – it follows an Ojibwe teenager who’s an unenrolled tribal member, and so feels she’s never quite fit into her family. Emily Layden’s All Girls gave me Prep vibes (amazing), and was serious and insightful about the inner worlds of teenage girls (rare). I picked up T. Kingfisher’s Bryony and Roses after loving her short story in Escape Pod; this Beauty and the Beast retelling is heavily influenced by Robin McKinley’s Beauty and Rose Daughter, but still brings its own wit and logic to the table, plus a nicely chilling touch of horror.

Biggest Disappointments

By ‘biggest disappointments’ I don’t necessarily 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. I have to say, there were a lot of disappointments in 2021. For whatever reason, this was a pretty lacklustre reading year for me. So this list is longer than normal.

I was disappointed by quite a few books written by authors I’ve loved in the past. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun promised a fresh take on AI but was just a tired rehash of Never Let Me Go. Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness drowned in its own tweeness about literature, despite a promising central cast. And Fiona Mozley’s Hot Stew abandoned all the subtlety of Elmet for Dickensian caricatures.

Elizabeth Macneal’s Circus of Wonders unfortunately didn’t live up to her excellent debut, The Doll Factory. Jessie Greengrass’s The High House had none of the originality of Sight. Mark O’Connell’s Notes From an Apocalypse was only mildly disappointing compared to his To Be A Machine until I reached the end, where he admits he regularly lies to his young son about the state of the world – this is horrific (children know what’s going on, so lying to them just leaves them alone with their fears). Sarah Moss’s The Fell confirmed to me that I don’t like the direction her writing is currently going. Finally, after loving Kindred so much, I did not get on at all with Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, although some of this was not Butler’s fault – so many YA writers have clearly copied her dystopian tropes that they now feel cliched in a way they wouldn’t have done when the book was originally published. Still, I found the heroine disturbingly monomaniacal and the diary entry format limiting.

At least some of this must be me, rather than the books! But I think it explains why 2021 felt like such a dud of a reading year, even though I also read many books that I loved. On that note…

I’ll be back tomorrow with my Top Ten Books of 2021!