July Releases, II: Howard Norman, Andrés N. Ordorica, Neil D. A. Stewart
Three more July releases after yesterday’s Disability Pride Month special. Today is all fiction, but with rather different settings: Atlantic Canada, upstate New York and Mexico, and a London restaurant. The time period ranges from the last days of the First World War to 2013. The themes? Murder, plagues, accidental deaths and gourmet food in addition to those perennial subjects of finding love and coming to terms with identity.
Come to the Window by Howard Norman
This was my eighth book by Norman and felt most similar to My Darling Detective and Next Life Might Be Kinder. Nothing much happens in the Nova Scotia fishing village of Parrsboro – until the night in April 1918 that Elizabeth Frame shoots dead her husband of 11 hours and throws the revolver into the blowhole of a beached whale. The story is a boon for Toby Havenshaw, a journalist with the Halifax Evening Mail, and quickly becomes an obsession. It’s never a whodunit so much as a why as Toby reports on the trial and follows Elizabeth when she goes on the lam. The sordid case just keeps getting stranger, drawing in bigamy, illegitimate pregnancy, and so on.
But Norman never treats all this too seriously; it is almost a tragicomic foil to the more consequential matters of world war and an influenza pandemic, which soon has Atlantic Canada in its grip as well. Toby’s wife, Amelia, is a hospital surgeon operating on returning veterans. She’s so quietly capable she makes Toby look a dunce, and their everyday rapport and unusual road to parenthood in their late thirties are charming. I also enjoyed Norman’s Dickensian naming (Bevel Cousins, Dr. S. S. Particulate) and literary references: the title phrase is from Matthew Arnold, and L. M. Montgomery gets a mention.
No doubt Norman wrote this as a Covid response; the parallel with the Spanish flu has been irresistible for many. He really captures the feeling of living through a uniquely terrible world situation. However, I’m not sure this short novel will prove memorable. Such has been true for his other recent novels, which pale in comparison with The Bird Artist. (Read via Edelweiss)
How We Named the Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica
I learned about this through the Observer’s 10 best new novelists feature and requested a copy via a Northern Fiction Alliance online showcase. There’s a sweet Heartstopper vibe to the story of an unlikely romance blooming between Daniel de la Luna and Sam Morris, his roommate at the University of Cayuga (= Cornell). Sam is a hunky jock while Daniel is a nervous would-be writer who has only just become comfortable with calling himself gay.
Ordorica, also a poet, immediately sets an elegiac tone by revealing Sam’s untimely death soon after the end of their freshman year. To cope with losing the love of his life, Daniel writes this text as if it’s an extended letter to Sam, recounting the course of their relationship – from strangers to best friends to secret lovers – and telling of his summer spent in Mexico exploring his family history, especially the parallels between his life and that of his late uncle and namesake, who was brave enough to be openly gay in the early days of the AIDS crisis.
Unfortunately, solid ideas and a warm-hearted approach are swamped by a host of problems. Ordorica writes a pretty good sex scene but the rest is clichéd, purple or awkward prose (“I snapped photo after photo of you, laughing all the while from your infectious elation”; “I felt unmoored, unsettled, and utterly liminal, in a state of flux”; “I sank into my pillows, muffling my tears as my mind floundered into even deeper waves of sadness”) and stiff dialogue. The cultural references and terminology feel all wrong for 2011, let alone for the 1988 diary entries of Uncle Daniel’s. The Mexico subplot is too tidy and Daniel’s breakdown after news of Sam’s death, which appears to involve full-blown alcohol addiction, is implausibly resolved within a chapter. The characterization of the secondary figures, particularly Daniel’s trio of queer Cayuga friends, is tissue thin.
It seems likely that Ordorica channeled much of his own experience into this queer coming-of-age narrative. He may have been aiming for star-crossed lovers and a groundbreaking own voices story, but this is run-of-the-mill stuff – more like a college student’s first draft than a finished book.
With thanks to Saraband for the proof copy for review.
Test Kitchen by Neil D. A. Stewart
I spied this in one of Susan’s monthly previews. (If you haven’t already subscribed to her blog, do so at once. You’ll never be short of ideas for what to read.) Midgard is a fine dining restaurant with a tree in the middle whose multiple small courses evoke childhood memories and disguise one foodstuff as another. The London establishment earned two Michelin stars and has a perpetual waiting list, but as a news piece at the start presages, it will be forced to close its doors within five years after a series of disasters. Every other chapter introduces another set of diners, table by table: a first date, a reunion of old friends, a 12-year-old foodie trying to forestall his parents’ divorce, a restaurant critic and her freeloading acquaintances, and a solitary man who should really get that face wound seen to.
Many of these situations aren’t what they seem; the same goes for the intervening glimpses into the kitchen. Our host for these is Marley, the most recently hired waitress, who fled a chaotic home life in Melbourne. She didn’t show for work today; she’s in hiding, yet knows everything about the staff dynamics so is a perfect tour guide. There’s a mixture of nerves and bravado running through the kitchen as dinner starts. A knife accident, a food allergy, and a champagne cork hitting a customer are only the beginning of the evening’s mishaps. While I was initially drawn to the structure, which is almost like a linked short story collection, and I can’t resist a restaurant setting, the narrative trickery and the way that the mood evolves from slapstick to grotesque put me off. I enjoyed individual vignettes, but the whole didn’t come together as satisfyingly as in Sweetbitter or Service, among others.
With thanks to Corsair (Hachette) for the free copy for review.
Any July releases you’d recommend?
20 Books of Summer, 10: Babel by R. F. Kuang (2022)
I substituted this in as my one doorstopper of the challenge after I failed with the new Persaud. It’s a bit of a cheat in that I actually started reading Babel in January, but I only just finished it this morning. I raced through the first 200 pages or so at the start of the year and loved all the geeky etymological footnotes and musings on translation. I thought I’d read it within a matter of days, which would have been a real feat for me. It’s hard to say why, instead, I stalled and found it difficult to regain sustained interest in the months that followed. Initially, it was a buddy read for me and my husband (his bookmark is still stranded at p. 178). His pithy comment, early on, was, “So, this is basically a woke Harry Potter?” And that’s actually a pretty apt summary. Four students at a magical academy – the Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford University, also known as Babel – find themselves questioning their responsibilities and loyalties as they confront the forces of evil, specifically colonialism.
When Robin Swift’s mother dies of cholera, he’s rescued from Canton by Professor Lovell and taken to England to train for entrance into Babel, a tower beside the Radcliffe Camera. He, Ramy (Indian), Victoire (Haitian) and Letty, the only white member of the quartet, are soon inseparable. While Victoire and Letty face prejudice for being female, it’s nothing to the experience of being racially other. Luckily, Babel values foreignness: intimate knowledge of other languages is an asset. In Kuang’s speculative 1830s setting, Britain’s economy is founded on a warped alchemy: silver is turned into energy to keep everyday life running smoothly in the industrializing nation. This is accomplished by harnessing the power of words. Silver bars are engraved with match-pairs – a phrase in a foreign language and its closest English counterpart – and the incantation of that untranslatable meaning sparks action. Spells keep bridges standing and traffic flowing; used for ill, they kill and destroy.
Robin and his friends gradually realise that their work at Babel is reinforcing mass poverty and the colonial system and, ultimately, fuelling future wars. “Truly, the only ones who seemed to profit from the silver industrial revolution were those who were already rich, and the select few others, who were cunning or lucky enough to make themselves so.” He becomes radicalized via the clandestine Hermes Society, which, Robin Hood-like, siphons silver resources away from where they are concentrated in Oxford to where they can help the oppressed. Surprised to learn who else is involved in Hermes, Robin (name not coincidental!) starts working behind the backs of his friends and professors, driven by conscience yet loath to give up the prospects he has through the tremendous privilege of being part of Babel. It goes from being an ivory tower of academia to being a hideaway for strikers and the besieged. And if you know your Bible stories, you’ll remember that Babel is destined to fall.
In faux-archaic fashion, Kuang has given her novel a lengthy subtitle: “Or: The Necessity of Violence – An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.” The principle behind Hermes is that justice will never be achieved by negotiation; only by force. “Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table; violence was the only option.” Kuang published this fourth novel at age 26 and it manifests a certain youthful idealism. The sense of retrospective righteous anger is justified but also unsubtle; I felt similarly about Kuang’s Yellowface. Although there are exciting twists in the latter half of the book, I preferred the early semi-Dickensian atmosphere as Robin investigates his parentage and learns the joy of language and friendship. Kuang also adds a queer angle: an unrequited heterosexual crush comes to nothing because two same-sex friends are in love, even if they can never say. For as full-on and high-stakes as the plot becomes, I wished I could stay in this quieter mode.
Kuang has rendered the historical setting admirably and, though this is a typical adventure novel in that she has prioritized action over depth of characterization, one does get invested in the central characters and their interactions. The whole silver-working motif at first seems implausible but quickly becomes an accepted part of the background. Longstanding fantasy readers will probably have no problem reading this, but if you’re unsure and daunted by the 540-page length, ask yourself just how interested you are in word meanings and the history of colonialism and uprisings. (Little Free Library) 
[P.S. OMG, have you seen her wedding photos from a few weeks ago?!]
Also two DNFs, argh!
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: Travels among the Collectors of Iceland by A. Kendra Greene (2020) – This sounded quirky and fun, but it turns out it was too niche for me. I read the first two “Galleries” (78 pp.) about the Icelandic Phallological Museum and one woman’s stone collection. Another writer might have used a penis museum as an excuse for lots of cheap laughs, but Greene doesn’t succumb. Still, “no matter how erudite or innocent you imagine yourself to be, you will discover that everything is funnier when you talk about a penis museum. … It’s not salacious. It’s not even funny, except that the joke is on you.” I think I might have preferred a zany Sarah Vowell approach to the material. (Secondhand – Bas Books and Home, Newbury)
Because I Don’t Know What You Mean and What You Don’t by Josie Long (2023) – A free signed copy – and, if I’m honest, a cover reminiscent of Ned Beauman’s Glow – induced me to try an author I’d never heard of. She’s a stand-up comic, apparently, not that you’d know it from these utterly boring, one-note stories about unhappy adolescents and mums on London council estates. I read 108 pages but could barely tell you what a single story was about. Long is decent at voices, but you need compelling stories to house them. (Little Free Library)
20 Books of Summer, 7–9: Furies, The Earthquake Bird, and Greta & Valdin
It might seem that I’m very behind on 20 Books of Summer, and I am, but that’s mostly because I’ve done my usual trick of starting loads of books at once so that I’m currently in the middle of another nine with no prospect of finishing any particularly soon. I will eventually review more, but probably all in a rush and on the later side. It doesn’t help that quite a few happen to be lacklustre reads, such that I have to push myself through them instead of enjoying spending time with the stack. For today, though, I have a pretty readable trio made up of feminist short stories, a mild Japan-set mystery, and a highly random queer dysfunctional family novel that rose from indie obscurity in New Zealand. (Also a DNF.)
Furies: Stories of the Wicked, Wild and Untamed (2023)
It was my second attempt at this Virago anthology; I borrowed it from the library last year but never opened it, as far as I can remember. Each story is named after a synonym for “virago,” so the focus is on strong and unconventional women, but given that brief there is huge variety, including memoir (Ali Smith’s “Spitfire,” about her late mother’s WAAF service), historical research (CN Lester on sexology and early trans figures, Emma Donoghue on early-twentieth-century activist and lesbian Kathlyn Oliver, Stella Duffy on menopause) and even one graphic short, the mother–daughter horror story “She-Devil” by comics artist Eleanor Crewes.
As with any anthology, some pieces stand out more than others. Caroline O’Donoghue, Helen Oyeyemi and Kamila Shamsie’s contributions were unlikely to convert me into a fan. Margaret Atwood is ever sly and accessible, with “Siren” opening with the line “Today’s Liminal Beings Knitting Circle will now be called to order.” I was surprised to get on really well with Kirsty Logan’s “Wench,” about girls ostracized by their religious community because of their desire for each other – I’ll have to read Now She Is Witch, as it’s set in the same fictional world – and Chibundu Onuzo’s “Warrior,” about Deborah, an Israelite leader in the book of Judges. And while I doubt I need to read a whole novel by Rachel Seiffert, I did enjoy “Fury,” about a group of Polish women who fended off Nazi invaders.
A few of my favourites were “Harridan” by Linda Grant, about an older woman who frightens the young couple who share her flat’s garden during lockdown (“this old lady, this hag she sees, this bitter travesty of her celestial youth and beauty is not her. Inside she’s a flame, she’s a pistol”); “Muckraker” by Susie Boyt, in which a woman makes conquests of breast cancer widowers; and “Tygress” by Claire Kohda, where the stereotype of the Asian ‘tiger mother’ turns literal. Duffy’s “Dragon” closes the collection with a very interesting blend of autofiction, interviews and medical reportage about different experiences of objectification in youth and invisibility in ageing. It brings the whole together nicely: “Tell me your tale and, in the telling, feel it all drop away. You are, and you are not, your story. Keep what serves you now, make space for new maybes.” (Free from a neighbour)
The Earthquake Bird: A Novel of Mystery by Susanna Jones (2001)
Susanna Jones’s When Nights Are Cold is one of my favourite novels that no one else has ever heard of, so I jumped at the chance to buy a bargain copy of her debut back in 2020. Lucy Fly has lived in Tokyo for ten years, working as a translator of machinery manuals. She wanted to get as far away as possible from her conventional family of six brothers, so she’s less than thrilled to meet fellow Yorkshire lass Lily Bridges, a nurse new to the country and looking for someone to help her find an apartment and learn some basic Japanese. Lucy is a prickly loner with only a few friends – and a lover, photographer Teiji – but she reluctantly agrees to be Lily’s guide.
We know from the start that Lucy is in custody being questioned about events leading up to Lily’s murder. She refuses to tell the police anything, but what we are reading is her confession, in which she does eventually tell all. We learn that there have already been three accidental deaths among her family and acquaintances – she seems cursed to attract them – and that her feelings about Lily changed over the months she showed the woman around. This short and reasonably compelling book gives glimpses of mountain scenery, noodle bars, and spartan apartments. Perhaps inevitably, it reminded me a bit of Murakami. It’s hard to resist an unreliable narrator. However, I felt Jones’s habit of having Lucy speak of herself in the third person was overdone. (Secondhand – Broad Street Book Centre, Hay-on-Wye) 
Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly (2021; 2024)
The title characters are a brother and sister in their late twenties who share a flat and a tendency to sabotage romantic relationships. Both are matter-of-factly queer and biracial (Māori/Russian). The novel flips back and forth between their present-tense first-person narration with each short chapter. It takes quite a while to pick up on who is who in the extended Vladisavljevic clan and their New Zealand university milieu (their father is a science professor and Greta an English department PhD and tutor), so I was glad of the character list at the start.
I was expecting a breezy, snarky read and to an extent that’s what I got. Not a whole lot happens; situations advance infinitesimally through quirky dialogue thick with pop culture references. There are some quite funny one-liners, but the plot is so meandering and the voices so deadpan that I struggled to remain engaged. (On her website, Reilly, who is Māori, ascribes the book’s randomness to her neurodivergence.)
The protagonists seem so affectedly cynical that when they exhibit strong feelings for new partners, you’re a bit taken aback. Really, Reilly can do serious? One of the siblings is reunited with a former partner and starts to think about settling down and even adopting a child. This is the last novel I would have expected to end with a wedding, but so it does. If you’re a big fan of Elif Batuman and Naoise Dolan, this might be up your street. Below are some sample lines that should help you make up your mind (quotes unattributed to minimize spoilers).
I don’t really feel like anything these days, just a beautiful husk filled with opinions about globalism and a strong desire to go out for dinner.
I don’t think you’re the weirdest person I’ve ever met even though you do sometimes talk like a philosophical narrator in an independent film.
I’m trying to write my wedding speech, so I don’t go off on a tangent and start listing my favourite Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. I was thinking I could write an acrostic poem, but I’ve made the foolish decision of marrying someone whose name begins with X.
With thanks to Hutchinson Heinemann (Penguin Random House) for the free copy for review.
And a DNF:
The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh by Ingrid Persaud – I thought Persaud’s debut novel, Love after Love, was fantastic, but I was right to be daunted by the length of this follow-up. The strategy is similar to that in Mrs. Hemingway by Naomi Wood: giving sideways looks at a famous man through the women he collected around him. John Boysie Singh was a real-life Trinidadian gangster who was hanged for his crimes in 1957 (as the article reprinted on the first page reveals). The major problem here is that all four of the dialect voices sound much the same, so I couldn’t tell them apart. Each time I opened the book, I had to look back at the blurb to be reminded that Popo was his prostitute mistress while Mana Lala was the mother of his son Chunksee. In the 103 pages I read (less than one-fifth of the total), there were so few chapters by Doris and Rosie that I never got a handle on who they were. Nor did I come to understand, or care about, Boysie. The editor needed to make drastic changes to this to ensure widespread readability. (Signed copy won in a Faber Instagram giveaway)
The Bookshop Band in Abingdon & 20 Books of Summer, 6: Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch
The Bookshop Band have been among my favourite musical acts since I first saw play live at the Hungerford Literary Festival in 2014. Initially formed of three local musicians for hire, they got their start in 2010 as the house band at Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath, England. For their first four years, they wrote a pair of original songs about a new book, often the very day of an author’s event in the shop, and performed them on guitar, cello, and ukulele as an interlude to the evening’s reading and discussion.
Notable songs from their first 13 albums are based on Glow by Ned Beauman (“We Are the Foxes”), Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller (“Bobo and the Cattle”), The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (“How Not to Woo a Woman”), and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (“You Make the Best Plans, Thomas”). They have also written responses to classic literature, with songs inspired by Alice in Wonderland, various Shakespeare plays, and a compilation of first lines called “Once Upon a Time.”
I got to see the band live five times pre-pandemic, even after husband-and-wife-duo Ben Please and Beth Porter moved nearly 400 miles away to Wigtown, the Book Town of Scotland. During the first six months of Covid-19 lockdown, the livestream concerts from their attic were weekly treats to look forward to. They also interviewed authors for a breakfast chat show as part of the Wigtown Book Festival, which went online that year.
In the years since, the band has kept busy with other projects (not to mention two children). Porter sings and performs on the two Spell Songs albums based on Robert Macfarlane’s The Lost Words and its sequel. Together they composed the soundtrack to Aardman Animations’ short film, Robin Robin (2021) – winning Best Music at the British Animation Awards, and wrote an album of songs based on Scottish children’s literature. And they have continued writing one-off book songs, such as for the launch of Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. (I’m disappointed their songs about All My Wild Mothers by Victoria Bennett and The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan still haven’t made it onto record.)
I’ve been enthusing about them for nearly a decade, but they’ve remained mostly under the radar in that time. Not so any longer; their recent album Emerge, Return was produced by Pete Townshend of The Who; the production value has notably advanced while retaining their indie spirit. Foreword Reviews kindly agreed to pay me to fangirl – er, write a blog – about Emerge, Return and the tour supporting it, so I’ll leave it there for the music criticism (their complete discography is now available on Bandcamp and Spotify). I’ll just add that a number of these ‘new’ songs have been kicking around for six to ten years but went unrecorded until now. For that reason, I worried that it might feel like a collection of cast-offs, but in fact they’ve managed to produce something sonically and thematically cohesive. It’s darker than some of their previous work, with moody minor chords and slightly sinister subjects.
Julia Pastrana after death. George Wick, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
I’ve often found that the band will zero in on a detail, scene, or idea that never would have stood out to me while reading a book but, in retrospect, evokes the whole with great success. I decided to test this out by reading Carol Birch’s Orphans of the Carnival in the weeks leading up to seeing them on their months-long UK summer/autumn tour. It’s a historical novel about real-life 1850s Mexican circus “freak” Julia Pastrana, who had congenital conditions that caused her face and body to be covered in thick hair and her jaw and lips to protrude. Cruel contemporaries called her the world’s ugliest woman and warned that pregnant women should not be allowed to see her on tour lest the shock cause them to miscarry. Medical doctors posited, in all seriousness, that she was a link between humans and orangutans.
My copy of Birch’s novel was a remainder, and it is certainly a minor work compared to the Booker Prize-shortlisted Jamrach’s Menagerie. Facts about Julia’s travel itinerary and fellow oddballs quickly grow tedious, and while one of course sympathizes when children throw rocks at her, she never becomes a fully realized character rather than a curiosity.
There is also a bizarre secondary storyline set in 1983, in which Rose fills her London apartment with hoarded objects, including a doll she rescues from a skip and names Tattoo. She becomes obsessed with the idea of visiting a doll museum in Mexico. I thought that Tattoo would turn out to be Julia’s childhood doll Yatzi (similar to in A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power, where dolls have sentimental and magical power across the centuries), but the connection, though literal, was not as I expected. It’s more grotesque than that. And stranger than fiction, frankly.
{SPOILERS AHEAD}
Birch sticks to the known details of Julia’s life. She had various agents, the final one being Theo Lent, who married her. (In the novel, he can’t bring himself to kiss her, but he can, you know, impregnate her.) She died of a fever soon after childbirth. Her son, Theo Junior, who inherited her hypertrichosis, also died within days. Both bodies were embalmed, sold, and exhibited. Theo then married another hairy woman, Marie Bartel of Germany, who took the name “Zenora” and posed as Julia’s sister. Theo died, syphilitic (or so Birch implies) and insane, in a Russian asylum. Julia and Theo Junior’s remains were displayed and mislaid at various points over the years, with Julia’s finally repatriated to Mexico for a proper burial in 2013. In the novel, Tattoo is, in fact, Theo Junior’s mummy.
Two Bookshop Band songs from the new album are about the novel: “Doll” and “Waggons and Wheels.” “Doll” is one of the few more lighthearted numbers on the album. It ended up being a surprise favourite track for me (along with the creepy “Eve in Your Garden,” about Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, and “Room for Three,” a sombre yet resolute epic written for the launch of Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage) because of its jaunty music-hall tempo; the pattern of repeating most nouns three times; and the hand claps, “deedily” vocal fills, unhinged recorder playing, and springy sound effects. The lyrics are almost a riddle: “When’s a doll (doll doll) not a doll (doll doll)?” They somehow avoid all spoilers while conveying something of the mental instability of a couple of characters.
The gorgeous “Waggons and Wheels” picks up on the melancholy tone and parental worries of earlier tracks from the album. The chorus has a wistful air as Julia ponders the passage of time and her constant isolation: “old friends, new deals / Winter or spring, I am hiding … Winter or spring, I’ll be travelling.” Porter’s mellow soprano tempers Julia’s outrage at mistreatment: “who are you to shout / Indecency and shame? / Shocking, I shock, so lock me out / I’m locked into this face.” She fears, too, what will happen to her child, “a beast or a boy, a monster or joy”. Listening to the song, I feel that the band saw past the specifics to plumb the universal feelings that get readers empathizing with Julia as a protagonist. They’ve gotten to the essence of the story in a way that Birch perhaps never did. Mediocre book; lovely songs. (New (bargain) purchase – Dollar Tree, Bowie, Maryland) 
I caught the Emerge, Return tour at St Nicolas’ Church in Abingdon (an event hosted by Mostly Books) last night. It was my sixth time seeing the Bookshop Band in concert – see also my write-ups of two 2016 events plus one in 2018 and another in 2019 – but the first time in person since the pandemic. I got to show off my limited-edition T-shirt. How nice it was to meet up again with blogger friend Annabel, too! Fun fact for you: Ben was born in Abingdon but hadn’t been back since he was two. Beth’s cousin turned up to the show as well. Although they have their daughters, 2 and 7, on the tour with them, they were being looked after elsewhere for the evening so the parents could relax a bit. Across the two sets, they played seven tracks from the new album, six old favourites, and two curios: one Spell Song, and an untitled song they wrote for the audiobook of Jackie Morris’s The Unwinding. It was a brilliant evening!
The Best Books from the First Half of 2024
Hard to believe, but it’s that time of year already! It’s the eighth year in a row that I’ve been making a first-half superlatives list. It remains to be seen how many of these will make it onto my overall best-of year rundown, but for now, these are my 18 favourite 2024 releases that I’ve read so far (representing the top 20% of my current-year reading). One is a bonus in that it won’t actually be published until August; six happen to be books I reviewed for Shelf Awareness. Pictured below are the ones I read in print; all the others were e-copies. Links are to my full reviews where available.
Fiction
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: This nuanced debut novel alternately goes along with and flouts the tropes of spy fiction and time travel sci-fi, making clever observations about how we frame stories of empire and progress. The narrator is a “bridge” helping to resettle a Victorian polar explorer in near-future London. You just have to suspend disbelief and go with it. Bradley’s descriptive prose is memorable but never quirky for the sake of it. I haven’t had so much fun with a book since Romantic Comedy. A witty, sexy, off-kilter gem.
Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj: Darraj’s second novel-in-stories is a shimmering composite portrait of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore. Across nine stellar linked stories, she explores the complex relationships between characters divided by—or connected despite—class, language, and traditional values. Each of the stories (four in the first person, five in the third person) spotlights a particular character. The book depicts the variety of immigrant and second-generation experience, especially women’s.
Piglet by Lottie Hazell: The protagonist works for a cookbook publisher, loves to cook, and has a history of overeating during psychological distress. When her fiancé blindsides her with a confession 13 days before their wedding, she returns to binge eating, dress fittings be damned. Food is also a sign of her education and class pretensions. Uncomfortable themes, but I kept reading in fascinated horror because Hazell writes absolutely incredible scenes. This is also about what women are allowed to want, and how they are expected to settle.
Wellness by Nathan Hill: A state-of-the-nation novel filtered through one Chicago family experiencing midlife and marital crises: underperforming academic Jack; his wife Elizabeth, a placebo researcher at Wellness; and their YouTube-obsessed son Toby. They’ve recently invested their life savings in a new condo. The addictive and spot-on novel asks questions about authenticity, purpose, and nurture. Is love itself a placebo? Hill is clearly fascinated with psychological experimentation but also turns it to humorous effect.
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim: Over 2.5 days in June 2020, a Korean American family (mother Hannah and 20-year-old twins Mia and John, home from college for the lockdown) investigates, on their own and with the help of police and tip-offs, what happened to the father, Adam, who’d been at River Falls Park with the severely disabled 14-year-old son, Eugene, who is autistic and has mosaic Angelman syndrome. Mia narrates, and it’s a pleasure spending time with her quick, systematic brain as she considers each theory and red herring.
Company by Shannon Sanders: This energetic debut novel in 13 linked stories traces several generations of the Collins clan, whose experiences at once exemplify African American gentrification and evoke timeless patterns of parental legacy and sibling jealousy. Sisters Cassandra, Fay, Lee and Suzette grew up at their parents’ Atlantic City jazz club before going their separate ways. We revisit relatives at different points in their lives, mostly between the 1990s and the present day. Celebration scenes make for memorable moments.
Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang (illus. LeUyen Pham): A super-cute teen story with gorgeous illustrations, including lots of pink and red to suit the theme. We follow Vietnamese-American Valentina through high school as she plays host to an internal debate between cynicism and romanticism. Ever since her mother left, she’s longed to believe in romance but feared that love is a doomed prospect for her family. The Asian community of Oakland, California and a new hobby of lion dancing provide engrossing cultural detail.
Nonfiction
Intervals by Marianne Brooker: An extended essay about her mother’s protracted death with multiple sclerosis and the issues it brought up around disability, poverty, and inequality of access to medical care and services. Brooker decries the injustice of the wealthy having the option of travelling to Dignitas in Switzerland for an assisted death, whereas her single mother had so such relief in sight. Brooker’s description of the vigil of the last days, like her account of her vivacious mother’s life, is both tender and unflinching.
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley: A bereavement memoir like no other. Heart-wrenching yet witty, it bears a unique structure and offers fascinating glimpses into the New York City publishing world. Crosley’s Manhattan apartment was burgled exactly a month before the suicide of her best friend and former boss, Russell. Throughout the book, the whereabouts of her family jewelry is as much of a mystery as the reason for Russell’s death, and investigating the stolen goods in parallel serves as a displacement activity for her.
First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger: Poignant interlocking essays about female friendship. Love and death coexist here. Dancyger’s first best friend was her cousin Sabina, who was raped and murdered at age 20. “Sad Girls” takes on Sylvia Plath fandom. Dancyger also maps her bisexuality and ponders whether to have a child. She is nostalgic for the freedom of being young and unsupervised in New York City and Europe. A sensitive interrogation of women’s relationships, perfect for fans of Melissa Febos and Emma Straub.
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti: Heti put 10 years of diary contents into a spreadsheet, alphabetizing each sentence, and then ruthlessly culled the results. The recurring topics are familiar from the rest of her oeuvre: obsessive cogitating about relationships, art and identity, but also the practicalities of trying to make a living as a woman in a creative profession. Heti transcends the quotidian by exploding chronology. Remarkably, the collage approach produces a genuine, crystalline vision of the self. A sui generis work of life writing.
Others Like Me: The Lives of Women without Children by Nicole Louie: This impassioned auto/biographical collage combines the strengths of oral history, group biography and a fragmented memoir. “Motherhood as the epicentre of women’s lives was all I’d ever witnessed” via her mother and grandmother, Louie writes, so finding examples of women living differently was key. As readers, we watch her life, her thinking and the book all take shape. It’s intimate and empathetic, with layers of stories that reflect diversity of experience.
The Age of Loneliness: Essays by Laura Marris: A perceptive, moving collection of nine braided essays linking personal experience of loss with the climate crisis. “Cancerine” is a strong example. Cancer, the sign of the crab, was her father’s cause of death; horseshoe crabs were ground into fertilizer in the 19th century, and their blood is still harvested for biomedical testing. Driven by curiosity and environmental conscience, these reflective pieces reminiscent of Helen Macdonald’s longform journalism ponder human responsibility and resilience. [Graywolf Press, 6 August]
Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie: I’ve not had much success with Rushdie’s fiction, but this is excellent, with intriguing side tendrils and lots of quotable lines. It traces lead-up and aftermath; unexpected echoes, symbolism and ironies. Although Rushdie goes into some medical detail about his recovery, you get the sense of him more as an unchanging mind and a resolute will. The most remarkable section imagines dialogues between him and his imprisoned assailant, probing his beliefs and motivations.
Poetry
Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali: In this poised debut collection by a Muslim poet, spiritual enlightenment is a female, embodied experience, mediated by the matriarchs of the Abrahamic faiths. Ali’s poems hymn women’s bodies, desire, and motherhood. She blurs the line between human and divine with her allusions to the Quran. Ambivalence towards faith is clear in the alliteration-laden verse that recalls Kaveh Akbar’s. Wordplay, floral metaphors, and multiple ghazals make for dazzling language.
Baby Schema by Isabel Galleymore: A slant-wise look at environmental crisis and an impending decision about motherhood. The title comes from Konrad Lorenz’s identification of features that invite nurture. Galleymore edges towards the satirical fantasies of Caroline Bird or Patricia Lockwood as she imagines alternative scenarios of caregiving. What is worthy of maternal concern? Does cuteness merit survival? Extinction and eco-grief on the one hand, yes, but the implacability of biological cycles on the other. Sardonic yet humane.
Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez: This debut collection recalls a Midwest girlhood of fairground rides and lake swimming, tornadoes and cicadas. But her Kansas isn’t all rose-tinted nostalgia; there’s an edge of sadness and danger. “Missing History” notes how women’s stories, such as her grandmother’s, are lost to time. In “Tilt-A-Whirl,” her older sister’s harmless flirtation with a ride operator turns sinister. She also takes inspiration from headlines. The alliteration and slant rhymes are to die for. (Full review to come.)
Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick: Motherhood and the body are overarching themes. The speaker experiences multiple miscarriages and names her lost children after plants. Becoming a mother is a metamorphosis all its own, while the second long section is about her husband transitioning. Bird metaphors are inescapable. The structure varies throughout: columns, stanzas; a list, a recipe. Amid the sadness, there is dark humour and one-line rejoinders. If you’re wondering how life can be captured in achingly beautiful poetry, look no further.
Two of the novels above were among my Most Anticipated books of the year. I’ve now read 10 of the 12 on that list and DNFed another (the Sarah Perry), which just leaves Memory Piece by Lisa Ko to find – though others’ responses make me think it might not be worthwhile to do so. I sometimes wonder if designating a book as anticipated or a priority is a kiss of death, as I was at least somewhat disappointed with over half of my choices this time.
In the second part of the year, I’m looking forward to new releases from Rachel Clarke, Sarah Manguso, Charlotte Mendelson, Richard Powers, Sally Rooney, Elizabeth Strout and Evie Wyld.
What 2024 releases should I catch up on? What’s in your sights for the rest of the year?
20 Books of Summer, 3–4: Cheri & All Things Are Too Small
A cancer story that treads the line between biography and fiction, and a set of high-brow essays about popular culture and modern life.
Cheri by Jo Ann Beard (2023)
{SPOILERS IN THIS ONE}
Claire Keegan helped popularize the trend of publishing stand-alone stories as small hardback volumes. It was my first time reading Beard, and her style does in fact remind me of Keegan, along with Denis Johnson and Ann Patchett. This originally appeared in the literary magazine Tin House in 2002. It is the life story of Cheri Tremble, a real woman who was born in 1950 and died in 1997 via an illegal assisted suicide conducted by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. I’d heard a lot about Cheri, but his name was never mentioned – to avoid spoilers, of course, yet it’s key.
Cheri is an Amtrak ticket-taker who’s diagnosed with breast cancer in her mid-forties. After routine reconstructive surgery goes wrong and she’s left disabled, she returns to the Midwest and buys a home in Iowa. Here she’s supported by her best friends Linda and Wayne, and visited by her daughters Sarah and Katy. “Others have lived. She won’t be one of them. She feels it in her bones, quite literally.” When she hears the cancer has metastasized, she refuses treatment and starts making alternative plans. She’s philosophical about it; “Forty-six years is a long time if you look at it a certain way. Ursa is her seventh dog.”
Beard recounts all of this matter-of-factly (“the diminished lung capacity, the clangorous pain”), drawing on what is known of Cheri Tremble’s life and only adding her own stamp by making up memories that fuel flashbacks as Cheri drifts through pain-filled half-waking. One of these, of falling through the ice on a frozen pond as a child, appears early in the book and recurs at her moment of death. Beard also contrasts onlookers’ compassion or lack thereof.
It’s a potent portrait of everyday suffering and heroism and, in its way, an argument for assisted dying, which mustn’t be cloaked in secrecy as it was for Cheri – “They leave under cover of darkness, like duck hunters or criminals” to meet ‘Dr. Death’ in another state. I finished the story feeling underwhelmed; maybe I’ve simply read too much around the topic, but I couldn’t see how granting the subject interiority (which is what fiction is all about, yes, though the best biographies can do it, too) was enough to set it apart. (New purchase with birthday voucher, Hungerford Bookshop)
All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld (2024)
Rothfeld, the Washington Post’s nonfiction book reviewer, is on hiatus from a philosophy PhD at Harvard. Her academic background is clear from her vocabulary. The more accessible essays tend to be ones that were previously published in periodicals. Although the topics range widely – decluttering, true crime, consent, binge eating, online stalking – she’s assembled them under a dichotomy of parsimony versus indulgence. And you know from the title that she errs on the side of the latter. Luxuriate in lust, wallow in words, stick two fingers up to minimalism and mindfulness and be your own messy self. You might boil the message down to: Love what you love, because that’s what makes you an individual. And happy individuals – well, ideally, in an equal society that gives everyone the same access to self-fulfillment and art – make for a thriving culture. That, with some Barthes and Kant quotes.
The writing has verve, from the alliterative word choice to the forcefulness of Rothfeld’s opinions. But in places her points of reference (from classic cinema, especially) are so obscure that I had no way in and the pieces felt like they would never end. My two favourites were “More Is More,” in which she’s as down on fragmentary autofiction (Jenny Offill et al.) as she is on Marie Kondo; and “Normal Novels,” about how she finds Sally Rooney’s self-deprecation and communism problematic. I knew the subject matter well enough to follow the arguments here, even if I ultimately disagreed with them.
The U.S. cover featuring a Bosch painting is so much better!
Rothfeld is worth reading as a cultural critic, at least in small doses. She is clearly not interested in being a personal essayist, however, as the intimacy she keeps discussing in theory is almost completely absent. A piece on mental health, “Wherever You Go, You Could Leave,” opens with one tantalizing autobiographical line – “My first year of college, I attempted suicide and was promptly hastened home by an ominously smiling administrator” – then proceeds to poke fun at meditation for most of its 40 pages. It was interesting to see her fan-girl over her favourite novel, which I would even try if it wasn’t 480 pages: “I want to be reading Mating [by Norman Rush] constantly; I want to have been reading Mating forever, but always for the first time; I want everything in my life to be Mating and nothing but Mating”. Keep an eye out for the sequel: Actually, Moderation Is Cool: How I Learned to Temper My Expectations.
With thanks to Virago Press for the free copy for review.
Sandwich by Catherine Newman (Blog Tour)
Catherine Newman’s second novel for adults, Sandwich, takes place during a week on Cape Cod, a popular Massachusetts beach resort. Rachel, nicknamed “Rocky,” is a fiftysomething mother to two young adults, Jamie and Willa. She and her husband Nick have been renting the same cottage for their family’s summer vacations for 20 years. Although Rocky narrates most of the novel in the first person, in the Prologue she paints the scene for the reader in the third person: “They’ve been coming here for so many years that there’s a watercolor wash over all of it now … pleasant, pastel memories of taffy, clam strips, and beachcombing.”
Also present are Maya, Jamie’s girlfriend; Rocky’s ageing parents; and Chicken the cat (can you imagine taking your cat on holiday?!). With such close quarters, it’s impossible to keep secrets. Over the week of merry eating and drinking, much swimming, and plenty of no-holds-barred conversations, some major drama emerges via both the oldies and the youngsters. And it’s not just present crises; the past is always with Rocky. Cape Cod has developed layers of emotional memories for her. She’s simultaneously nostalgic for her kids’ babyhood and delighted with the confident, intelligent grown-ups they’ve become. She’s grateful for the family she has, but also haunted by inherited trauma and pregnancy loss.
There couldn’t be more ideal reading for women in the so-called “sandwich generation” who have children growing towards independence as well as parents starting to struggle with infirmity. (The contemporary storyline of Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, which coincidentally is about a character named Willa, is comparable in that respect.) Newman is frank about Willa’s lesbianism and Rocky’s bisexuality, and she doesn’t hold back about the difficulties of menopause, either. Rocky is challenged to rethink her responsibilities as a daughter, wife and mother when she’s surrounded by equally strong-willed people who won’t do what she wants them to. The novel is so quirky, funny and relatable that it’s impossible not to sympathize with Rocky even if, like me, you’re in a very different life situation.
I like the U.S. cover so much more!
One observation I would make is that Rocky is virtually identical to Ash in Newman’s debut, We All Want Impossible Things, and to the author in real life (as I know from subscribing to her Substack). If you read even the most basic information about her, it’s clear that it’s all autofiction. That’s not an issue for me as I don’t think inventing is inherently superior to drawing from experience; some authors write what they know in a literal sense and that’s okay. So, for her fans, more of the same will be no problem at all. But it is a very particular voice: intense, scatty, purposely outrageous. Rocky is a protagonist who says things like, “How am I a feminist, an advocate for reproductive rights, Our Bodies, Ourselves, hear me roar, blah blah, and I am only just now learning about vaginal atrophy?” (A companion nonfiction read would be Nina Stibbe’s Went to London, Took the Dog.)
In outlook Newman reminds me a lot of Anne Lamott, who is equally forthright and whose books similarly juxtapose life’s joy and sorrows, especially in this late passage: “this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel.”
This is a sweet, fun, chatty book that’s about a summer break – and would be perfect to read on a summer break.
With thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours and Doubleday for the free e-copy for review.
Buy Sandwich from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
I was delighted to help close out the blog tour for Sandwich. See below for details of where the other reviews have appeared.
Reading the Meow, Part II: Books by Bernardine Bishop and Matt Haig
This is my second contribution to the Reading the Meow challenge, hosted by Mallika of Literary Potpourri, after yesterday’s review of Sleeping with Cats by Marge Piercy. One of the below novels is obviously cat-themed; the other less so, but the cover and blurb convinced me to take a chance on a new-to-me author and I discovered a hidden gem.
The Street by Bernardine Bishop (2015)
Prices are so cheap at my local charity warehouse (3/£1 paperbacks) that I recently did something I almost never do: bought a book I’d never heard of, by an author I’d never heard of, and then (something I definitely never do!) read it almost right away instead of letting it gather dust on my shelves for years. Bishop’s biography is wild. As a new Cambridge graduate, she was the youngest witness in the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, then published two novels in her early twenties. She married twice, had two sons and a psychotherapy career, and returned to writing fiction after 50 years – prompted by a cancer diagnosis. Unexpected Lessons in Love was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award in 2013, while this and Hidden Knowledge were both published posthumously, after Bishop’s death in 2015.
So: there is a cat on the cover and the blurb mentions it, too: “a beloved cat achieves immortality.” (I should have realized that was a euphemism, but never mind.) The novel opens with news of the death at 90 of formidable Brenda Byfleet, who’d been a Greenham Common woman and taken part in peace protests right into old age. Neighbours quickly realize someone will need to care for her cat Benn (named for Tony Benn), and the duty falls to Anne and Eric, who have also taken in their grandson while his parents are in Canada.
What follows is a low-key ensemble story that moves with ease between several key residences of Palmerston Street, London, introducing us to a couple struggling with infertility, a war veteran with dementia, an underemployed actor who rescues his wife from her boss’s unwanted attentions, and so on. Most touching is the relationship between Anne and Georgia, a lesbian snail researcher who paints Anne’s portrait. Their friendship shades into quiet, middle-aged love.
There are secrets and threats and climactic moments here, but always the reassuring sense that neighbours are a kind of second family and so someone will be there for you to rely on no matter what you face. (I can think of a certain soap opera theme that expresses a similar sentiment…) Bishop’s style reminds me most of Tessa Hadley’s. She is equally skilled at drawing children and the elderly, and clearly feels love and compassion for her flawed characters: “Everything and everyone in the street was bathed in a blessed ordinariness.”
From Brenda onward, Georgia’s rhetorical question hangs over the short novel: “What is a life?” The implied partial answer is: what is remembered by those left behind. The opening paragraph is perfect –
“Sometimes it is impossible to turn even a short London street into a village. But sometimes it can be easily done. It all depends on one or two personalities.”
… and the last page has kittens. This was altogether a lovely read. Dangit, why didn’t I also buy the other Bishop novel that was on shelf at the charity warehouse?! I’ll have to hope it’s still around the next time I go there. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury) 
To Be a Cat by Matt Haig (2012)
This was a reasonably cute middle-grade fantasy and careful-what-you-wish-for cautionary tale. On his twelfth birthday, Barney Willow thinks life couldn’t get worse. His parents are divorced, his dad has recently disappeared, he’s bullied by Gavin Needle, and evil head teacher Miss Whipmire seems to have a personal vendetta against him. His only friend is Rissa Fairweather, who lives on a barge. Little does he know that an idle wish to switch places with a cat he pets on the street will set a dangerous adventure in motion. Now he’s a cat and Maurice the cat has his body. Soon Barney realizes there’s a whole subset of cats who are former humans (alongside “swipers,” proper fighting street cats; and “firesides,” who prefer to stay indoors), including Miss Whipmire, who used to be a Siamese cat and has an escape plan that involves Barney. I felt the influence of Roald Dahl and Terry Pratchett, but Haig doesn’t have their writing chops. Apart from Rissa, the characterization is too clichéd. I’m sure I would have enjoyed this at age eight, though. (Little Free Library)
20 Books of Summer, 1: Company by Shannon Sanders
I started the summer’s reading right with Company. Shannon Sanders’s energetic debut novel-in-stories traces several generations of the Collins clan, whose experiences at once exemplify African American gentrification and evoke timeless patterns of parental legacy and sibling jealousy. Sisters Cassandra, Fay, Lee and Suzette grew up at their parents’ Atlantic City jazz club before going their separate ways: Cassandra to a PhD and provost position at a college, Fay to painting and the role of family spirit-keeper, Lee to her own brood of four and a no-good jazz musician husband, and Suzette to music and a too-early death. With roots in Mississippi, they have dispersed to Atlanta, New York City and Washington, DC.
We revisit relatives at different points in their lives, mostly between the 1990s and the present day. There are 13 linked stories here, 10 in the third person and three with a first-person narrator. Each focuses on a different individual or set of characters. Celebration scenes make for memorable moments. “Bird of Paradise” is set at the party to commemorate Cassandra’s new position. There’s a Black president at the time and people can’t stop comparing her dress to Michelle Obama’s inaugural ball attire, while she can’t stop fretting that she and her nieces will live up to stereotypes of Black women’s bodies. Later, “La Belle Hottentote” revisits this evening from the nieces’ perspective as they ponder where the family’s money came from. In “Rioja,” Cassandra’s daughter Cecilia, visiting her boyfriend Cole’s family for Thanksgiving, tries not to embarrass him with any pretentious or avant-garde behavior.
The title story, which is among the stand-outs, is the only one to feature the grandparent generation – though Opal and Centennial are but ghosts commenting on the begrudging welcome Fay offers when her niece Aubrey turns up on her doorstep in New Jersey. Fay is the sole sister without partner or children, but she got the family home as a sort of consolation prize and fills its walls with symbolism-heavy portraits of four sisters. My other favorite, alongside this and “Bird of Paradise,” was “The Opal Cleft,” in which Lee’s son Theo hosts his cousin Cyrus (Cassandra’s son) while the latter performs his drag queen act in the area.
I was reminded by turns of Danielle Evans, Kim Coleman Foote and Deesha Philyaw, while final story “The Everest Society,” about Lee’s daughter Mariolive’s desperation to impress the social worker who has to okay her and Dante adopting, recalls Sidik Fofana with its composite picture of their apartment building’s residents. In a few cases I felt that Sanders might have extended the sphere too wide by moving outside the family: “The Gatekeepers” I assume is about a co-worker or neighbor of Cassandra’s; “Mote” is about Cole’s cousin and his partner (and makes the one white woman in the book evil…); and “Dragonflies” features that cousin’s colleague. It’s not to say that these aren’t good stories, but I wondered why they couldn’t have starred extended family members instead.
Trying to get pregnant and the early days of motherhood are recurring concerns, as is the distribution of talent and wealth around the family and beyond. As these characters reach toward the upper middle class, they keep in mind the struggles they came from. Although the family legends morph over the years, shared habits and heirlooms make connections across the generations. Sanders is strong on characterization, scene-setting and social observation; I would happily have spent even longer with the Collins family. I’ll be keen to follow her career in the years to come.
With thanks to Pushkin Press for the free copy for review.
Literary Wives Club: Recipe for a Perfect Wife by Karma Brown (2019)
{SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW!}
Canadian author Karma Brown’s fifth novel features two female protagonists who lived in the same house in different decades. The dual timeline, which plays out in alternating chapters, contrasts the mid-1950s and late 2010s to ask 1) whether the situation of women has really improved and 2) if marriage is always and inevitably an oppressive force.
Nellie Murdoch loves cooking and gardening – great skills for a mid-twentieth-century housewife – but can’t stay pregnant, which provokes the anger of her abusive husband, Richard. To start with, Alice Hale can’t cook or garden for toffee and isn’t sure she wants a baby at all, but as she reads through Nellie’s unsent letters and recipes, interspersed with Ladies’ Home Journal issues in the boxes in the basement, she starts to not just admire Nellie but emulate her. She’s keeping several things from her husband Nate: she was fired from her publicist job after a pre-#MeToo scandal involving a handsy male author, she’s had an IUD fitted, and she’s made zero progress on the novel she’s supposed to be writing. But Nellie’s correspondence reveals secrets that inspire Alice to compose Recipe for a Perfect Wife.
The chapter epigraphs, mostly from period etiquette and relationship guides for young wives, provide ironic commentary on this pair of not-so-perfect marriages. Brown has us wondering how closely Alice will mirror Nellie’s trajectory (aborting her pregnancy? poisoning her husband?). There were clichéd elements, such as Richard’s adultery, glitzy New York City publishing events, Alice’s quirky-funny friend, and each woman having a kindly elderly (maternal) neighbour who looks out for her and gives her valuable advice. I felt uncomfortable with how Nellie’s mother’s suicide makes it seem like Nellie’s radical acts are borne out of inherited mental illness rather than a determination to make her own path.
Often, I felt Brown was “phoning it in,” if that phrase means anything to you. In other words, playing it safe and taking an easy and previously well-trodden path. Parallel stories like this can be clever, or can seem too simple and coincidental. However, I can affirm that the novel is highly readable and has vintage charm. I always enjoy epistolary inclusions like letters and recipes, and it was intriguing to see how Nellie uses her garden herbs and flowers for pharmaceutical uses. Our first foxglove just came into flower – eek! (Kindle purchase)
The main question we ask about the books we read for Literary Wives is:
What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?
- Being a wife does not have to mean being a housewife. (It also doesn’t have to mean being a mother, if you don’t want to be one.)
- Secrets can be lethal to a marriage. Even if they aren’t literally so, they’re a really bad idea.
This was, overall, a very bleak picture of marriage. In the 1950s strand there is a scene of marital rape – one of two I’ve read recently, and I find these particularly difficult to take. Alice’s marriage might not have blown up as dramatically, but still doesn’t appear healthy. She forced Nate to choose between her and the baby, and his job promotion in California. The fallout from that ultimatum is not going to make for a happy relationship. I almost thought that Nellie wields more power. However, both women get ahead through deception and manipulation. I think we are meant to cheer for what they achieve, and I did for Nellie’s revenge at Richard’s vileness, but Alice I found brattish and calculating.
See Kate’s, Kay’s and Naomi’s reviews, too!
Coming up next, in September: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 