Laura Rereading: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Before re-reading: I first read this in May 2012, when I was 25. I’m fairly certain I bought it as part of a Waterstones 3 for 2, given the patch on the front cover where there was once a sticker. We’ve been flooded by Greek myth retellings in recent years, but back then, this felt like something new and different.

The first time I read The Song of Achilles, I wrote a very long review! You can read the full thing here, but in summary: I loved this novel when I first read it, thinking that ‘Miller has a wonderful command of the pace, letting the story lull and loiter, at certain points, only to engage the reader’s interest more strongly when the next part of the tale kicks into action. There are several mini-stories told throughout the novel; Patroclus’s childhood; training with Chiron; journey to Troy; the saga of Briseis; Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon; and Miller unites them beautifully, but lets each tale complete itself before going onto the next. The most resonant scene in the novel, for me, was the well-known sequence where King Priam comes to beg Achilles for his son’s body; a scene that is powerful because it has equal resonance for a modern and classical audience, I imagine. “It is right to seek peace for the dead,” Priam tells the bereaved Achilles. “You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after.”‘

However, I did have some concerns about ‘the softening of the harsh classical belief systems of honour and sacrifice’ in the novel, especially through ‘Patroclus’s intense human sympathy and fellow-feeling for those suffering’. I thought that I would have liked to see Miller make ‘Achilles and Patroclus sympathetic in spite of this, rather than simply removing the obstacles to our identification with them… Patroclus’s modern values make Achilles and Patroclus feel sundered, set apart from the rest of the classical-minded Greeks, and I wanted to feel that they were part of that culture, even if their homosexual relationship differentiated them from the other men.’

After re-reading: This was an interesting one to reread! I felt like the doubts I expressed in my first review all crystallised into one big problem: the characterisation of Patroclus. I seem to have liked him a lot more when I first read The Song of Achilles, but this time round, I had doubts about him from the very first pages. I’m not sure why Miller decided to make him quite so useless at everything, so passive, so negative, so obsessed with Achilles to the exclusion of everything else. He sits at odds with the rest of the novel and with the society he’s grown up in, and made me feel, for most of the narrative, that Miller had tried too hard to make him an exception to this cult of heroic masculinity, which speaks to the ‘softening’ of the story I originally observed. It’s especially bizarre that she makes him totally unable to fight, given that we know he does a good enough job when he dons Achilles’ armour. Maybe she was trying to say something interesting about how inhabiting a different role unleashes abilities we didn’t know we had – but unfortunately, because Patroclus has skived military training for most of his life in this retelling, it’s just unbelievable that he’d perform well.

In contrast, Achilles is incredibly compelling: perhaps idealised for much of the text, but then, he’s the son of a goddess, and I don’t think the normal rules apply. I loved how Miller showed how his life was fundamentally shaped by divine foreknowledge: first, the knowledge that he will be the greatest of the Greeks, then the knowledge that he will die at Troy, and so he’s sacrificed the rest of his life in service of his honour. This is how you modernise a story like this, for my money: think through the real psychological burdens of believing these kind of prophecies. When Achilles seeks revenge on Agamemnon near the end of the novel by using Briseis as a pawn, his actions aren’t sympathetic but they are understandable because we know he’s staked so much on his reputation. (In contrast, Patroclus hangs around in the background being useless and ‘nice’, happy to let Briseis carry on being in love with him, which feels especially distasteful after he previously slept with another woman because he felt sorry for her). The secondary cast are also brilliantly portrayed: I LOVED Odysseus, as before, and feel even more aggrieved at how Miller does him wrong in Circe; she manages a morally grey Achilles here, but is happy to cast Odysseus to the dogs.

Having said all this, The Song of Achilles still stands as one of the best of the modern Greek myth retellings I have read, alongside Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls – and its last hundred pages are truly brilliant, as Achilles and Patroclus both cast aside much of the idealisation that constrained them during the rest of the novel, and become much more compromised, and more interesting, men.

Rating May 2012: ****1/2

Rating March 2023: ****

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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?

February Superlatives, 2023

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

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

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

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

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

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

My Favourite Reread This Month Was…

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

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

The Best Ghost Story I Read This Month Was…

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

The Silliest Book I Read This Month Was…

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

The Best Sequel I Read This Month Was…

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

Have you read any standout books in February?

‘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

‘Experiencing time as God experiences it’

Victoria Mackenzie’s debut novella, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain, is told in short fragments, switching between first-person narration from the significant late fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century female religious writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. As Mackenzie notes in her afterword, Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest book written in English by a woman, while Margery’s dictated The Book of Margery Kempe is the first autobiography in English by anybody at all. As my knowledge of these two figures is pretty limited, it’s hard to say how For Thy Great Pain… would read to somebody who knows more about them; but I thought the clarity and simplicity with which Mackenzie conveyed the ideas these women struggled with was impressive. While both wrestle with their relationship to God, I found that this novella both evoked how serious and important these questions were in the late medieval period, and had resonance for modern readers who don’t consider themselves to be religious.

In the early sections, I found it hard to tell Julian and Margery’s voices apart, but as the novel unfolds, Mackenzie establishes their distinctive characters and their very different attitudes to their holy visions. This novella focuses on Julian’s time as an anchoress – she spent the last twenty-plus years of her life in a cell annexed to St Julian’s Church in Norwich, with no physical contact with another human being. Mackenzie beautifully handles Julian’s early difficulties in her isolation, and also the reasons why she chooses it. ‘I had wanted to prolong each moment of my life, to get closer to experiencing time as God experiences it: not the instantly dissolving moment, but something larger and more encompassing. A stillness that doesn’t pass as soon as you think yourself into it. I’d thought I would live as slowly as moss in my stone cell. But… I was myself, with all my usual racing thoughts’.

In contrast, Margery is perhaps less obviously sympathetic as she roams around, telling others of her visions and crying publicly and loudly about the sufferings of Christ. Mackenzie writes her with wry humour, letting her desire to be remembered as a saint and comfort herself by thinking how she will be adored by God, Jesus and Mary in heaven even though she is mocked on earth. However, the clever choice to juxtapose Margery’s story with Julian’s allows us to take her on her own terms rather than having to read her as a symbol of how all medieval merchant women engaged with religious faith. We can see how her ostentatious holiness serves her in a patriarchal society, allowing her to do otherwise forbidden things like neglecting her children and refusing to have sex with her husband. While Julian’s backstory is more likely to appeal to the modern reader – tragically widowed, losing her only child, unable to understand Margery’s ingratitude for her fourteen children – Margery brings us closer to the otherness of the medieval past.

Despite the theological subject-matter, this book flowed so naturally that I found it difficult to put down, and even if I was sometimes inclined to skim the Margery sections to get back to Julian, I admired Mackenzie’s intentions in telling both of these stories.

I received a free proof copy of this novella from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on January 19th.

My Top Ten Books of 2022

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

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

In no particular order…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Stats

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

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

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

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

2022 In Books: Commendations and Disappointments

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

Highly Commended

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biggest Disappointments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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