#NovNov25 Final Statistics & Some 2026 Novellas to Look Out For (Chapman, Fennelly, Gremaud, Miles, Netherclift & Saunders)
Novellas in November 2025 was a roaring success: In total, we had 50 bloggers contributing 216 posts covering at least 207 books! The buddy read(s) had 14 participants. If you want to take a look back at the link parties, they’re all here. It was our best year yet – thank you.
*For those who are curious, our most reviewed book was The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (4 reviews), followed by The Most by Jessica Anthony (3). Authors covered three times: Franz Kafka and Christian Kracht. Authors with work(s) reviewed twice: Margaret Atwood, Nora Ephron, Hermann Hesse, Claire Keegan, Irmgard Keun, Thomas Mann, Patrick Modiano, Edna O’Brien, Clare O’Dea, Max Porter, Brigitte Reimann, Ivana Sajko, Georges Simenon, Colm Tóibín and Stefan Zweig.*
I read and reviewed 21 novellas in November. I happen to have already read six with 2026 release dates, some of them within November and others a bit earlier for paid reviews. I’ll give a quick preview of each so you’ll know which ones you want to look out for.
The Pass by Katriona Chapman
Claudia Grace is a rising star in the London restaurant world: in her early thirties, she’s head chef at Alley. But she and her small team, including sous chef Lisa, her best friend from culinary school; and Ben, the innovative Black bartender, face challenges. Lisa has a young son and disabled husband, while Ben is torn between his love of gardening and his commitment to Alley. Claudia is more stressed than ever as she prepares for a competition. All three struggle with their parents’ expectations. A financial crisis comes out of nowhere, but the greater threat is related to motivation. I was drawn to this graphic novel for the restaurant setting, but it’s more about families and romantic relationships than food. Several characters look too alike or much younger or older than they’re supposed to, while there’s a sudden ending that suggests a sequel might follow. (Fantagraphics, Jan. 20) [184 pages] (Read via Edelweiss) 
The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly
I’ve also read Fennelly’s previous collection of miniature autobiographical essays, Heating & Cooling. She takes the same approach as in flash fiction: some of these 45 pieces are as short as one sentence, remarking on life’s irony, poignancy or brevity. Again and again she loops back to her sister’s untimely death (the title reference: “without farewells, you slipped out the back door of the party of your life”); other major topics are her mother’s worsening dementia, her happy marriage, her continuing 28-year-old friendships with her college roommates, the pandemic, and her ageing body. Every so often, Fennelly experiments with third- or second-person narration, as when she recalls making a perfect gin and tonic for Tim O’Brien. One of the most in-depth pieces revisits a lonely stint teaching in Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s. Returning to the town recently, she is astounded that so many recognize her and that a time she experienced as bleak is the stuff of others’ fond memories. I also loved the long piece that closes the collection, “Dear Viewer of My Naked Body,” about being one of the 12 people in Oxford, Mississippi to pose nude for a painter in oils. Brilliant last phrase: “Enjoy the bunions.” (W.W. Norton & Company, Feb. 24) [144 pages] (Read via Edelweiss) 
Generator by Rinny Gremaud (2023; 2026)
[Trans. from French by Holly James]
“I was born in 1977 at a nuclear power plant in the south of South Korea,” the unnamed narrator opens. She and her mother then moved to Switzerland with her stepfather. In 2017, news of Korea’s plans to decommission the Kori 1 reactor prompts her to trace her birth father, who was a Welsh engineer on the project. As a way of “walking my hypotheses,” she travels to Wales, Taiwan (where he had a wife and family), Korea, and Michigan, his last known abode. In parallel, she researches the history of nuclear power. By riffing on the possible definitions of generation, this lyrical autofiction comments on creation and legacy. Full Foreword review forthcoming. (Schaffner Press, Jan. 7) [197 pages] (PDF review copy)
Eradication: A Fable by Jonathan Miles
This taut, powerful fable pits an Everyman against seemingly insurmountable environmental and personal problems. Who wouldn’t take a job that involves “saving the world”? Adi, the antihero of Jonathan Miles’s fourth novel, is drawn to the listing not just for the noble mission but also for the chance at five weeks alone on a Pacific island. Santa Flora once teemed with endemic birds and reptiles, but many species have gone extinct because of the ballooning population of goats. He’s never fired a gun, but the mysterious “foundation” was so desperate it hired him anyway. It’s a taut parable reminiscent of T.C. Boyle’s When the Killing’s Done. My full Shelf Awareness review is here. (riverrun, 5 Feb. / Doubleday, Feb. 10) [176 pages] (Read via Edelweiss)
Vessel: The shape of absent bodies by Dani Netherclift
One scorching afternoon in 1993, the author’s father and brother drowned while swimming in an irrigation channel near their Australia home. A joint closed-casket funeral took place six days later. Eighteen at the time, Netherclift witnessed her relatives’ disappearance but didn’t see their bodies. Must one see the corpse to have closure? she wonders. “The presence of absence” is an overarching paradox. There are lacunae everywhere: in her police statement from the fateful day; in her journal and letters from that summer. The contradictions and ironies of the situation defy resolution. Full Foreword review forthcoming. (Assembly Press, Jan. 13) [184 pages] (PDF review copy)
Vigil by George Saunders
Impossible not to set this against the exceptional Lincoln in the Bardo, focused as both are on the threshold between life and death. Unfortunately, the comparison is not favourable to Vigil. A host of the restive dead visit the dying to offer comfort at the end. Jill Blaine’s life was cut short when she was murdered by a car bomb in a case of mistaken identity. Her latest “charge” is K.J. Boone, a Texas oil tycoon who not only contributed directly to climate breakdown but also deliberately spread anti-environmentalist propaganda through speeches and a documentary. As he lies dying of cancer in his mansion, he’s visited by, among others, the spirits of the repentant Frenchman who invented the engine and an Indian man whose family perished in a natural disaster. I expected a Christmas Carol-type reckoning with climate past and future; in resisting such a formula, Saunders avoids moralizing – oblivion comes for the just and the unjust. However, he instead subjects readers to a slog of repetitive, half-baked comedic monologues. I remain unsure what he hoped to achieve with the combination of an irredeemable character and an inexorable situation. All this does is reinforce randomness and hopelessness, whereas the few other Saunders works I’ve read have at least reassured with the sparkle of human ingenuity. YMMV. (Bloomsbury / Random House, 27 Jan.) [192 pages] (Read via NetGalley) 
The Best Books from the First Half of 2025
Hard to believe it, but it’s that time of year already. It’s the ninth 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 16 favourite 2025 releases that I’ve read so far (representing the top ~21% of my current-year reading). Pictured below are the ones I read in print; all the others were e-copies. Links are to my full reviews.
Fiction
Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel: Alison has writer’s block and is consumed with anxiety about the state of the world. “Who can draw when the world is burning?” Then she has an idea for a book – or maybe a reality TV series – called $UM that will wean people off of capitalism. That creative journey is mirrored here. Through Alison’s ageing hippie friends and their kids, Bechdel showcases alternative ways of living. Even the throwaway phrases are hilarious. It’s a gleeful and zeitgeist-y satire, yet draws to a touching close.
Sleep by Honor Jones: A breathtaking character study of a woman raising young daughters and facing memories of childhood abuse. Margaret’s 1990s New Jersey upbringing seems idyllic, but upper-middle-class suburbia conceals the perils of a dysfunctional family headed by a narcissistic, controlling mother. Jones crafts unforgettable, crystalline scenes. There are subtle echoes throughout as the past threatens to repeat. Reminiscent of Sarah Moss and Evie Wyld, and astonishing for its psychological acuity, this promises great things from Jones.
Save Me, Stranger by Erika Krouse: Twelve first-person narratives voiced by people in crisis, for whom encounters with strangers tender the possibility of transformation. In the title story, the narrator is taken hostage in a convenience store hold-up. Others are set in Thailand and Japan as well as various U.S. states. Krouse focuses on young women presented with dilemmas and often eschews tidy endings, leaving characters on the brink and allowing readers to draw inferences. Fans of Danielle Evans and Lauren Groff have a treat in store.
Insectopolis: A Natural History by Peter Kuper: “If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” (E. O. Wilson) After an unspecified apocalypse, only insects remain. Group by group, they guide readers through an empty New York Public Library exhibit, interacting within and across species. It’s a sly blend of science, history, stories and silliness. There are interludes about insects in literature and unsung heroines of entomology. Informative and entertaining at once; what could be better? Welcome our insect overlords!
A Family Matter by Claire Lynch: In her research into UK divorce cases in the 1980s, Lynch learned that 90% of lesbian mothers lost custody of their children. Her earnest, delicate debut novel, which bounces between 2022 and 1982, imagines such a situation through close portraits of three family members. Maggie knew only that her mother, Dawn, abandoned her when she was little. Lynch’s compassion is equal for all three characters. This confident, tender story of changing mores and steadfast love is the new Carol for our times.
Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund: Nine short fictions form a stunning investigation into how violence and family dysfunction reverberate. “The Peeping Toms” and “The Stalker” are a knockout pair featuring Albuquerque lesbian couples under threat by male acquaintances. Characters are haunted by loss and grapple with moral dilemmas. Each story has the complexity and emotional depth of a novel. Freedom versus safety for queer people is a resonant theme in an engrossing collection ideal for Alice Munro and Edward St. Aubyn fans.
Dream State by Eric Puchner: It starts as a glistening romantic comedy about t Charlie and Cece’s chaotic wedding at a Montana lake house in summer 2004. First half the wedding party falls ill with norovirus, then the best man, Garrett, falls in love with the bride. The rest examines the fallout of this uneasy love triangle as it stretches towards 2050 and imagines a Western USA smothered in smoke from near-constant forest fires. Still, there are funny set-pieces and warm family interactions. Cross Jonathan Franzen and Maggie Shipstead.
Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld: Sittenfeld’s second collection features characters negotiating principles and privilege in midlife. Split equally between first- and third-person perspectives, the 12 contemporary storylines spotlight everyday marital and parenting challenges. Dual timelines offer opportunities for hindsight on the events of decades ago. Nostalgic yet clear-eyed, these witty stories exploring how decisions determine the future are perfect for fans of Rebecca Makkai, Kiley Reid, and Emma Straub.
Nonfiction
Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You: A memoir of saying the unsayable with food by Candice Chung: A vibrant essay collection spotlighting food and family. Chung reconnects with her semi-estranged parents by taking them along on restaurant review gigs for a Sydney newspaper. Fresh from a 13-year relationship with “the psychic reader,” she starts dating again and quickly falls in deep with “the geographer.” The essays range in time and style, delicately contrasting past and present, singleness and being partneredr.
Poets Square: A Memoir in 30 Cats by Courtney Gustafson: Working for a food bank, trapped in a cycle of dead-end jobs and rising rents: Gustafson saw firsthand how broken systems and poverty wear people down. She’d recently started feeding and getting veterinary care for a feral cat colony in her Tucson, Arizona neighbourhood. With its radiant portraits of individual cats and its realistic perspective on personal and collective problems, this is a cathartic memoir and a probing study of building communities of care in times of hardship.
Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing, ed. Alden Jones: Sixteen authors of diverse sexual orientations and genders contrast here and there and then and now as they narrate sensory memories and personal epiphanies. In these pieces, time abroad sparks clarity. There’s power in queer solidarity, whether one is in Berlin or Key West. Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s piece is the highlight. A stellar anthology of miniature travelogues that are as illuminating about identity as they are about the places they feature.
Immemorial by Lauren Markham: An outstanding book-length essay that compares language, memorials, and rituals as strategies for coping with climate anxiety and grief. The dichotomies of the physical versus the abstract and the permanent versus the ephemeral are explored. Forthright, wistful, and determined, the book treats grief as a positive, as “fuel” or a “portal.” Hope is not theoretical in this setup, but solidified in action. This is an elegant meditation on memory and impermanence in an age of climate crisis.
Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future that Never Was) by Colette Shade: Shade’s debut collection contains 10 perceptive essays that contrast the promise and political pitfalls of “the Y2K Era” (1997–2008). The author recalls the thrill of early Internet use and celebrity culture. Consumerism was a fundamental doctrine but the financial crash prompted a loss of faith in progress. Outer space motifs, reality television, Smashmouth lyrics: it’s a feast of millennial nostalgia. Yet this hard-hitting work of cultural criticism, recommended to Jia Tolentino fans, reminisces only to burst bubbles.
Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson: A book about everything, by way of ginseng. It begins with Thompson’s childhood summers working on American ginseng farms with his siblings in Marathon, Wisconsin. As an adult, he travels first to Midwest ginseng farms and festivals and then through China and Korea to learn about the plant’s history, cultivation, lore, and medicinal uses. Roots are symbolic of a family story that unfolds in parallel. Both expansive and intimate, this is a surprising gem from one of the best long-form graphic storytellers.
Poetry
Is This My Final Form? by Amy Gerstler: This delightfully odd collection amazes with its range of voices and techniques. It leaps from surrealism to elegy as it ponders life’s unpredictability. The language of transformation is integrated throughout. Aging and the seasons are examples of everyday changes. Elsewhere, speakers fall in love with the bride of Frankenstein or turn to dinosaur urine for a wellness regimen. Monologues and sonnets recur. Alliteration plus internal and end rhymes create satisfying resonance.
Small Pointed Things by Erica McAlpine: McAlpine’s second collection is full of flora and fauna imagery. The title phrase comes from the opening poem, “Bats and Swallows” – in the “gloaming,” it’s hard to tell the difference between the flying creatures. The verse is bursting with alliteration and end rhymes. She expands the view through conversations, theories and travel. What-ifs, consequences and regrets; mythical allusions, elegies and the concerns of motherhood. Just my sort of poetry: sweet on the ear, rooted in nature and the everyday.
Which of these grab your attention? What other 2025 releases should I catch up on?
Book Serendipity, Mid-April to Mid-June
I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every couple of months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. People frequently ask how I remember all of these coincidences. The answer is: I jot them down on scraps of paper or input them immediately into a file on my PC desktop; otherwise, they would flit away!
The following are in roughly chronological order.
- Raising a wild animal but (mostly) calling it by its species rather than by a pet name (so “Pigeon” and “the leveret/hare”) in We Should All Be Birds by Brian Buckbee and Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton.
- Eating hash cookies in New York City in Women by Chloe Caldwell and How to Be Somebody Else by Miranda Pountney.
- A woman worries she’s left underclothes strewn about a room she’s about to show someone in one story of Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny and Days of Light by Megan Hunter.
The dialogue is italicized in Women by Chloe Caldwell and Days of Light by Megan Hunter.
- The ‘you know it when you see it’ definition (originally for pornography) is cited in Moderation by Elaine Castillo and Bookish by Lucy Mangan.
- Women (including the protagonist) weightlifting in a gym in Moderation by Elaine Castillo and All Fours by Miranda July.
- Miranda July, whose All Fours I was also reading at the time, was mentioned in Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You by Candice Chung.
- A sibling story and a mystical light: late last year into early 2025 I read The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham, and then I recognized this type of moment in Days of Light by Megan Hunter.
- A lesbian couple with a furniture store in Carol [The Price of Salt] by Patricia Highsmith and one story of Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund.
- Not being able to see the stars in Las Vegas because of light pollution was mentioned in The Wild Dark by Craig Childs, then in Moderation by Elaine Castillo.
- A gynaecology appointment scene in All Fours by Miranda July and How to Be Somebody Else by Miranda Pountney.
- An awkwardly tall woman in Heartwood by Amity Gaige, How to Be Somebody Else by Miranda Pountney, and Stoner by John Williams.
- The 9/11 memorial lights’ disastrous effect on birds is mentioned in The Wild Dark by Craig Childs and How to Be Somebody Else by Miranda Pountney.
- A car accident precipitated by an encounter with wildlife is key to the denouement in the novellas Women by Chloe Caldwell and Wild Boar by Hannah Lutz.
- The plot is set in motion by the death of an older brother by drowning, and pork chops are served to an unexpected dinner guest, in Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven and Days of Light by Megan Hunter, both of which I was reading for Shelf Awareness review.
- Kids running around basically feral in a 1970s summer, and driving a box of human ashes around in Case Histories by Kate Atkinson and Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven.
- A character becomes a nun in Case Histories by Kate Atkinson and Days of Light by Megan Hunter.
- Wrens nesting just outside one’s front door in Lifelines by Julian Hoffman and Little Mercy by Robin Walter.
- ‘The female Woody Allen’ is the name given to a character in Women by Chloe Caldwell and then a description (in a blurb) of French author Nolwenn Le Blevennec.
- A children’s birthday party scene in Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny and Friends and Lovers by Nolwenn Le Blevennec. A children’s party is also mentioned in Case Histories by Kate Atkinson and A Family Matter by Claire Lynch.
- A man who changes his child’s nappies, unlike his father – evidence of different notions of masculinity in different generations, in Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, What My Father and I Don’t Talk About, edited by Michele Filgate, and one piece in Beyond Touch Sites, edited by Wendy McGrath.
- What’s in a name? Repeated names I came across included Pansy (Case Histories by Kate Atkinson and Days of Light by Megan Hunter), Olivia (Case Histories by Kate Atkinson and A Family Matter by Claire Lynch), Jackson (Case Histories by Kate Atkinson and So Far Gone by Jess Walter), and Elias (Good Girl by Aria Aber and Dream State by Eric Puchner).
- The old wives’ tale that you should run in zigzags to avoid an alligator appeared in Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez and then in The Girls Who Grow Big by Leila Mottley, both initially set in Florida.
- A teenage girl is groped in a nightclub in Good Girl by Aria Aber and Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann.
- Discussion of the extinction of human and animal cultures and languages in both Nature’s Genius by David Farrier and Lifelines by Julian Hoffman, two May 2025 releases I was reading at the same time.
- In Body: My Life in Parts by Nina B. Lichtenstein, she mentions Linn Ullmann – who lived on her street in Oslo and went to the same school (not favourably – the latter ‘stole’ her best friend!); at the same time, I was reading Linn Ullmann’s Girl, 1983! And then, in both books, the narrator recalls getting a severe sunburn.
On the same day, I read about otter sightings in Lifelines by Julian Hoffman and Spring by Michael Morpurgo. The next day, I read about nesting swallows in both books.
- The Salish people (Indigenous to North America) are mentioned in Lifelines by Julian Hoffman, Dream State by Eric Puchner (where Salish, the town in Montana, is also a setting), and So Far Gone by Jess Walter.
- Driving into a compound of extremists, and then the car being driven away by someone who’s not the owner, in Dream State by Eric Puchner and So Far Gone by Jess Walter.
- A woman worries about her (neurodivergent) husband saying weird things at a party in The Honesty Box by Lucy Brazier and Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal by Robin Ince.
- Shooting raccoons in Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson and So Far Gone by Jess Walter. (Raccoons also feature in Dream State by Eric Puchner.)
- A graphic novelist has Hollywood types adding (or at least threatening to add) wholly unsuitable supernatural elements to their plots in Spent by Alison Bechdel and Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson.
- A novel in which a character named Dawn has to give up her daughter in the early 1980s, one right after the other: A Family Matter by Claire Lynch, followed by Love Forms by Claire Adam.
- A girl barricades her bedroom door for fear of her older brother in Love Forms by Claire Adam and Sleep by Honor Jones.
- A scene of an only child learning that her mother had a hysterectomy and so couldn’t have any more children in Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Other People’s Mothers by Julie Marie Wade.
- An African hotel cleaner features in Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and The Hotel by Daisy Johnson.
- Annie Dillard’s essay “Living Like Weasels” is mentioned in Nature’s Genius by David Farrier and The Dry Season by Melissa Febos.
- A woman assembles an inventory of her former lovers in Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and The Dry Season by Melissa Febos.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
May Graphic Novels by Alison Bechdel, Peter Kuper & Craig Thompson
May has been chock-full of new releases for me! For this first batch of reviews, I’m featuring three fantastic graphic novels that have made it onto my Best of 2025 (so far) list. I don’t read graphic books as often as I’d like to – my library tends to major on superhero comics and manga, which aren’t my cup of tea – but I sometimes get a chance to access them for paid review purposes. (The first two below are ones I was sent for potential Shelf Awareness reviews, but I missed the deadlines.) Reading these took me back to the early 2010s when I worked for a university library in South London and would walk to Lambeth Library on my lunch breaks to borrow huge piles of books, mostly taking advantage of their excellent graphic novel selection. That was where my education and fascination began.
Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel
I’ve read all but one of Bechdel’s works now. Fun Home was among the first graphic books I read and is a great choice if you’re new to this form of storytelling. It’s a family memoir about her father’s funeral home business and closeted lifestyle, which emerged shortly after her own coming-out – and shortly before his accidental death. In Spent, Alison and her handy wife Holly live on a Vermont pygmy goat farm. Alison has writer’s block and is struggling financially despite her famous memoir about her taxidermist father having been made into a successful TV series, Death & Taxidermy. Mostly, she’s consumed with anxiety about the state of the world, what with the ongoing pandemic, her sister’s right-wing opinions, and the litany of awful headlines. “Who can draw when the world is burning?” she exclaims.
Then Alison has an idea for a book – or maybe a reality TV series – called $UM that will wean people off of capitalism. That creative journey is mirrored in Spent, which is composed of 12 “episodes” titled after Marxist terminology. Through Alison’s ageing hippie friends and their kids, Bechdel showcases alternative ways of living: a commune, a throuple, nonbinary identity, unpaid internships, Just Stop Oil demos, and the influencer lifestyle versus rejection of technology. It’s (auto)fiction exaggerated to the brink of absurdity, with details changed enough to mock but not enough to hide (e.g., she’s published by “Megalopub,” the hardware store is “Home Despot,” her show airs on “Schmamazon”).
Tiny details in the drawings reward close attention, such as Alison and Holly’s five cats’ antics during their morning routine, and a stuffed moose head rolling its eyes. It’s the funniest I can remember Bechdel being, with much broad humour derived from the outrageous screen mangling of her book – cannibalism, volcanoes and dragons come out of nowhere – and her middle-class friends’ hand-wringing over their liberal credentials. Even the throwaway phrases are hilarious. It’s a gleeful and zeitgeist-y satire, yet draws to a touching close as Alison has the epiphany that she can’t fix everything herself so must simply do what she can, “with a little help from her annoying, tender-hearted, and utterly luminous friends.”
Accessed as an e-book from Mariner Books. Published in the UK by Jonathan Cape (Penguin).
Insectopolis: A Natural History by Peter Kuper
Nearly a decade ago, I reviewed Peter Kuper’s Ruins, which features monarch migration and has as protagonist a laid-off Natural History Museum entomologist. Here insects have even more of a starring role. The E. O. Wilson epigraph sets the stage: “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” We follow an African American brother-and-sister pair, the one dubious and the other eager, as they walk downtown to the New York Public Library. The sister, who holds a PhD in entomology, promises that its exhibition on insects is going to be amazing. But just before they reach the building, a red alert flashes up on every smartphone and sirens start blaring. A week later, the city is a ruin of overturned cabs and debris. Only insects remain and, group by group, they guide readers through the empty exhibit, interacting within and across species.
It’s a sly blend of science, history, stories and silliness. I loved the scenes of mosquitoes and ants railing against how they’ve been depicted as villainous, and dignified dung beetles resisting scatological jokes and standing up for their importance in ecosystems. There are interesting interludes about insects in literature (not just Kafka and Nabokov, but the Japanese graphic novel The Book of Human Insects by Osamu Tezuka), and unsung heroines of entomology get their moment in the sun. The pages in which Margaret Collins, an African American termite researcher in the 1950s, and Rachel Carson appear to a dragonfly as ghosts and tell their stories of being dismissed by male researchers were among my favourites. Informative and entertaining at once; what could be better? Welcome our insect overlords!
Accessed as an e-book from W. W. Norton & Company.
Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson
I’d read several of Thompson’s works and especially enjoyed his previous graphic memoir, Blankets, about his first love and loss of faith. When I read this blurb, I worried the niche subject couldn’t possibly sustain my attention for nearly 450 pages. But I was wrong; this is a vital book about everything, by way of ginseng. It begins with childhood summers working on American ginseng farms with his siblings in Marathon, Wisconsin. Theirs was a blue collar and highly religious family, but Thompson and his little brother Phil were allowed to spend their earnings from the back-breaking labour of weeding and picking rocks as they pleased. Each hour, each dollar, meant a new comic from the pharmacy. “Comics helped me survive my childhood. But what will help me survive my adulthood?” Thompson asks.
Together with Phil, he travels first to Midwest ginseng farms and festivals and then through China and Korea to learn about the plant’s history, cultivation practices, lore, and medicinal uses. As he meets producers – including a Hmong man whose early life mirrors his own – he feels sheepish about how he makes a living: “I carry this working-class guilt – what I do isn’t real work.” When his livelihood is threatened by worsening autoimmune conditions, he tries everything from acupuncture to psychotherapy to save his hands and his creativity.
This chunky book has an appealing earth-tones palette and shifts smoothly between locations and styles, memories and research. When interviewing growers and Chinese medicine practitioners, the depictions are almost photorealistic, but there are also superhero pastiche panels and a cute ginseng mascot who pops up throughout the book. Like Spent, this pulls in class and economic issues in a lighthearted way and also explores its own composition process.
The story of ginseng is often sobering, involving the exploitation of immigrants (in the Notes, Thompson regrets that he was unable to speak with any of the Mexican migrant workers on whom the American ginseng harvest now depends), soil degradation, and pesticide pollution. The roots of the title are both literal and symbolic of the family story that unfolds in parallel. Both strands are captivating, but especially the autobiographical material: Thompson’s relationship with Phil, his new understanding but ongoing frustration with his parents, and the way all three siblings exhibit the damage of their upbringing – Phil’s marriage is crumbling; their sister Sarah, who has moved 26 times as an adult, wonders what she’s running from. A conversation with a Chinese herbal pharmacist gets to the heart of the matter: “I learned home is not WHERE I am. Home is HOW I am.”
Both expansive and intimate, this is a surprising gem from one of the best long-form graphic storytellers out there.
With thanks to Faber for the free copy for review. Published in the USA by Pantheon (Penguin).
Best Books of 2024: My Top 20
I’m keeping it simple again this year with one post covering all genres: these are the 20 current-year releases that stood out the most for me. (No rankings.) Those that aren’t repeated from my Best Books from the First Half of 2024 post didn’t quite make the cut but should be considered as runners-up well worth your time. Unsurprisingly, health is a common theme across many of my selections, especially as it touches women’s lives. Pictured below are the books I read in print; the others were all electronic copies. Links are to my full reviews where available.
Fiction
The Worst Journey in the World, Volume 1: Making Our Easting Down: The Graphic Novel by Sarah Airriess: The thrilling opening to a cinematically vivid adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s 1922 memoir. He was an assistant zoologist on Robert Falcon Scott’s perilous 1910-13 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. The book resembles a full-color storyboard for a Disney-style maritime adventure film. There is jolly camaraderie as the men sing sea shanties to boost morale. The next volume can’t arrive soon enough.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: This nuanced debut 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 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.
Clear by Carys Davies: Depicts the Highland Clearances in microcosm though Ivar, last resident of a remote Scottish island between Shetland and Norway. John is a minister sent by the landowner to remove Ivar. Mary, John’s wife, journeys from the mainland to rescue him. Davies writes striking scenes that bring the island scenery to life. Her deceptively simple prose captures the slow building of emotion and moments that change everything. For a trio that seemed on course for tragedy, there is the grace of a happier ending.
Small Rain by Garth Greenwell: A poet and academic (who both is and is not Greenwell) endures a Covid-era medical crisis that takes him to the brink of mortality and the boundary of survivable pain. Over two weeks, we become intimately acquainted with his every test, intervention, setback and fear. Experience is clarified precisely into fluent language that also flies far above a hospital bed, into a vibrant past, a poetic sensibility, a hoped-for normality. I’ve never read so remarkable an account of what it is to be a mind in a fragile body.
Wellness by Nathan Hill: A state-of-the-nation story 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 questions it to humorous effect.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney: Twenty- and thirtysomethings having lots of sex, yes, but now a solemn tone: Characters’ suffering and failures have deepened their thinking, sense of self, and ability to feel for others. Peter and Ivan lost their father to cancer; Sylvia is in chronic pain after an accident; Naomi is evicted and aimless; Margaret is ashamed of having an estranged alcoholic husband. Chess is a clever metaphor for their interactions; the depiction of grief rings true. A stylistic leap forward, too. Her best, most mature work by a mile.
The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck: A dozen stories form a “hook-and-chain” formation of five couplets, bookended by a first and last story related to each other. Links are satisfyingly overt: A pair takes place in the same New England house in different centuries; a companion piece fills in the history of the characters from the previous. All are historically convincing, and the very human themes of lust, parenthood, sorrow and frustrated ambition resonate across centuries and state lines. Really beautiful (and better than North Woods).
Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang (illus. LeUyen Pham): A super-cute teen graphic novel with gorgeous illustrations prioritizing 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
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 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.
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. Amazingly, the collage approach produces a genuine, crystalline vision of the self. A sui generis work of life writing.
Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom by Pam Houston: If you’re going to read a polemic, make sure it’s as elegantly written and expertly argued as this one. Houston responds to the overturning of Roe v. Wade with 60 micro-essays – one for each full year of her life – about what it means to be in a female body in a country that seeks to control and systematically devalue women. The cycling of topics makes for an exquisite structure. Houston is among my recommendations for top-notch authors you might not know.
The Body Alone: A Lyrical Articulation of Chronic Pain by Nina Lohman: Chronic Daily Headaches: Having a clinical term for extreme pain did nothing to solve it; no treatment Lohman has tried over a decade has helped much either. Medical professionals and friends alike downplay her experience because she is able to pass as well and raise two children. The fragmentary pieces read like poems. Bodily realities defy language, yet she employs words exquisitely. The tone flows from enraged to resigned to cynical and back.
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 warm and empathetic, with layers of stories that reflect diversity of experience.
A Termination by Honor Moore: A fascinatingly discursive memoir that circles a 1969 abortion and contrasts societal mores across her lifetime. Moore was a 23-year-old drama student; the termination was “my first autonomous decision,” she insists, a way of saying, “I want this life, not that life.” Family and social factors put her life into perspective. The concise text is composed of crystalline fragments, incorporating occasional second- and third-person narration. The kaleidoscopic yet fluid approach is stunning.
My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss: Moss effectively contrasts the would-be happily ever after of generally getting better after eight years of disordered eating with her anorexia returning with a vengeance at age 46. The mood shifts so that what threatens to be slightly cloying in the childhood section turns academically curious and then, somehow, despite distancing pronouns (mostly second- but also some third-person narration), intimate. Shape-shifting, devastating, staunchly pragmatic; a unique model for converting life into art.
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 many 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 noteworthy section imagines dialogues he might have with the imprisoned assailant, probing his beliefs and motivations.
Poetry
Want, the Lake by Jenny Factor: Factor’s long, intricate poetry collection showcases the tension between past and present and envisions womanhood as a tug of war between desire and constraint. “Elegy for a Younger Self” poems string together vivid reminiscences. In “Sapphics on Nursing” and elsewhere, romantic friendships edge toward homoeroticism; heterosexual marriage and motherhood represent either delightful intimacy or a snare. Allusion and experience, slant rhymes and wordplay craft a lavish tapestry.
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 becomes sinister. She also takes inspiration from headlines. The alliteration and slant rhymes are to die for.
Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick: Motherhood and the body are overarching themes. The speaker has multiple miscarriages and names her lost children after plants. Becoming a mother is a metamorphosis all its own, while another long section is about her husband’s transition. 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.
If I had to choose just one of each? This trio trying out complementary strategies for transmuting life into literature: Small Rain, Alphabetical Diaries and Egg/Shell.
Have you read any of these? Or might you now, based on my recommendation?
A Belated R.I.P., Part III: Hand, Hurley, Kingfisher and Meddings
I meant to post on Halloween but the day got away from me, so here’s my belated third contribution to the Readers Imbibing Peril challenge (the first two are here and here). It’s rare for me to borrow from the horror section of the library and even rarer for me to read sequels, yet here I am with two purple-spotted spines and three books that count as continuations. I’m a little surprised at myself for managing eight R.I.P. reviews this year, but five of those were of very short books or graphic novels so were quick reads. With the possible exception of the dystopian final chapter of the Hurley, none of my selections scared me.
A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand (2023)
Hand was commissioned by Shirley Jackson’s estate to write a sequel to The Haunting of Hill House, which I read for R.I.P. in 2019 (my review). As in the original, four people gather at Hill House; artists rather than ghost-hunters, but they soon grasp the place’s supernatural malevolence. Holly has written a play about a historical witch – to be portrayed by Amanda, an actress of a certain age. Holly’s girlfriend, Nisa, provides music in the form of traditional murder ballads; actor Stevie makes up the quartet. Despite locals’ persistent admonitions, they take out a short-term rental on Hill House, thinking it will be atmospheric to finish the play and conduct read-throughs there. I was solidly engaged with the characters, whom Hand reinforces with traumatic backstories (Amanda’s proximity to an accidental death, Stevie’s molestation as a child actor), but couldn’t take the scary reveals seriously. A tablecloth suddenly soaked in blood? A black hare falling out of a chimney? Such moments just felt silly, plus Hand overplays the warnings versus the quartet’s blithe heedlessness. The ending is actually pretty chilling, but too much that came before strained belief. Do read the Jackson if you haven’t, though; it’s genuinely frightening. (Public library) 
Barrowbeck by Andrew Michael Hurley (2024)
I’ve read all of Hurley’s novels (The Loney, Devil’s Day and Starve Acre), the first two for previous R.I.P. events. Here again, he explores the arcane beliefs and practices of an isolated community: Barrowbeck, a fictional valley on the Yorkshire–Lancashire borders. The 13 chapters, rather like linked short stories, alight at moments along its timeline, from the medieval conflict of “First Footing” all the way through the near-future desolation of “A Valediction.” What connects the vignettes is more tonal than geographical, though, with suspicion, exclusion and the uncanny recurring. There are hints of deadly customs and communion with the departed. As is true of most collections, some stories are more memorable than others, and I felt that a few went too far towards pastiche (e.g., “Autumn Pastoral” of The Woman in Black by Susan Hill). I had a few favourites: “To Think of Sicily,” set after the 15th-century visit of an Italian man bearing mysterious olive oil, introduces the people’s seemingly congenital xenophobia. In “Hymns for Easter,” residents killed in the First World War still join their voices with the choir’s. “Sisters,” about B&B operators trying to get rid of their solitary guest before closing for the winter, was the best of all and reminiscent of the twins in Daniel Mason’s North Woods. You should like this if you’re a Daisy Johnson fan or enjoyed Private Rites by Julia Armfield, though ultimately I found more difference than continuity across the chapters. 
With thanks to John Murray Press for the proof copy for review.
What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher (2024)
The second book of the “Sworn Soldier” duology, after What Moves the Dead. Easton has returned from Paris to their native Gallacia to give Miss Potter a fungi-hunting holiday as thanks for helping with the previous adventure. But the caretaker is dead and the home abandoned, so Easton hires a local widow and her grandson, Bors, to look after the property. Bors is soon troubled by the moroi, a ghost-woman who comes in dreams to sit on people’s chests, crushing the breath out of them. She also seems to take the form of moths. And next she comes for Easton. You’d think with all the world-building she’d done in the first book, Kingfisher could pack lots of plot into this novella. But there’s really not much to it. It was over before it began. The winking humour of the first book was worn-out. And the more I thought about it, the more uneasy I was with the negative nature imagery I kept encountering in horror: fungi, moths, rabbits/hares. I understand this is often harkening back to ancient legends, but in a biodiversity crisis we need love rather than fear. (Public library)
The Sad Ghost Club 2 by Lize Meddings (2022)
This teen comic series is not about literal ghosts but about mental health. Young people struggling with anxiety and intrusive thoughts recognize each other – they’ll be the ones wearing sheets with eye holes. In the first book, which I reviewed for R.I.P. last year, SG meets Socks and determines to start a society for people like them. In this sequel, Socks worries that he’s not cool enough for the club and that SG, especially after they meet Rue, will leave him behind. The message is about being there for people even when they think they just want to be alone. By the end, it looks like the club is going to grow further. This barely built on the first book and contained so little incident that it felt unnecessary. Never mind! (Little Free Library) 
Rather a lackluster finish to the challenge there, but the Hurley at least is recommended.
October Books: Ballard, Czarnecki, Moss, Oliver, Ostriker, Steed & More
Apparently October is THE biggest month of the year for new releases. A sterling set came my way this year, including two beautiful novella-length memoirs, a luxuriantly illustrated work dedicated to an everyday bird species, two very different but equally elegant poetry collections, and a book of offbeat comics. Time and concentration only allow for a paragraph or so on each, but I hope that gives a flavour of the contents and will pique interest in the ones that suit you best. Plus I excerpt and link to my BookBrowse review of a poignant story of sisters and mental illness, and my Shelf Awareness review of a fantastic graphic novel adaptation.
Bound: A Memoir of Making and Remaking by Maddie Ballard
This collection of micro-essays considers sewing and much more. Each piece is headed by a pattern name and list of materials that Ballard made into an article of clothing for herself or for someone else. Among the minutiae of the craft, she slips in so many threads: about her mixed Chinese heritage and her relationship with her grandmother, about the environmental and financial benefits of making one’s own clothing, and especially about the upheaval of her twenties: the pandemic, a break-up, leaving a job to go back to school, finding roommates. I can barely mend a sock and I’m clueless when it comes to fashion, yet I can appreciate how sewing blends comfort and creativity. Ballard presents it as a meditative act of self-care:
I lower the needle and the world recedes. The process of sewing a garment – printing the pattern, tracing and cutting, sewing the first and the second and the fiftieth seam – is a lesson in taking your time.
Like gardening, sewing is an investment in the future – in what sort of person your future self will be, and how she will feel about her body, and what she will want to wear.
Similar to two other very short works of nonfiction I’ve read from The Emma Press, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow and Tiny Moons by Nina Mingya Powles (Ballard, too, is from New Zealand), this is a graceful, enriching book about a young woman making her way in the world and figuring out what is essential to her sense of home and identity. I commend it whether or not you have any particular interest in handicraft.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the free copy for review.
Encounters with Inscriptions: A Memoir Exploring Books Gifted by Parents by Kristin Czarnecki
When Kristin Czarnecki got in touch to offer a copy of her bibliomemoir about revisiting the books her late parents gifted her, I was instantly intrigued but couldn’t have known in advance how perfect it would be for me. Niche it might seem, but it combines several of my reading interests: bereavement, books about books, relationships with parents (especially a mother) and literary travels.
The book starts, aptly, with childhood. A volume of Shel Silverstein poetry and A Child’s Christmas in Wales serve as perfect vehicles for the memories of how her parents passed on their love of literature and created family holiday rituals. Thereafter, the chapters are not strictly chronological but thematic. A work of women’s history opens up her mother’s involvement in the feminist movement; reading a Thomas Merton book reveals why his thinking was so important to her Catholic father. The interplay of literary criticism, cultural commentary and personal significance is especially effective in pieces on Alice Munro and Flannery O’Connor. A Virginia Woolf biography points to Czarnecki’s academic specialism and a cookbook to how food embodies memories.
It seems fitting to be reviewing this on the second anniversary of my mother’s death. The afterword, which follows on from the philosophical encouragement of a chapter on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, exhorts readers to cherish loved ones while we can – and be grateful for the tokens they leave behind. I had told Kristin about books my parents inscribed to me, as well as the journals I inherited from my mother. But I didn’t know there would be other specific connections between us, too, such as being childfree and hopeless in the kitchen. (Also, I have family in South Bend, Indiana, where she’s from, and our mothers were born in the first week of August.) All that to say, I felt that I found a kindred spirit in this lovely book, which is one of the nicest things that happens through reading.
With thanks to the author for the advanced e-copy for review.
The Starling: A Biography by Stephen Moss
Moss has written a whole series of accessible bird species monographs suitable for nature buffs; this is the sixth. (I’ve not read the others, just Moss’s Wild Hares and Hummingbirds and Skylarks with Rosie, but we do have a copy of The Robin on the shelf that I’ve earmarked for Christmas.) The choice of the term ‘biography’ indicates the meeting of a comprehensive aim and intimate detail. The book conveys much anatomical and historical information about the starling’s relatives, habits, and worldwide spread, yet is only 187 pages – and plenty of those feature relevant paintings and photographs, too. It’s well known that starlings were introduced to Anglophone countries as part of misguided “acclimatisation” projects that we would now dub cultural imperialism. In the USA and elsewhere, the bird is still considered common. But with the industrialisation of agriculture, starlings are actually having less breeding success and thus are in decline.
Overall, the style of the book is dry and slightly workmanlike. However, when he’s recounting murmurations he’s seen in Somerset or read about, Moss’s enthusiasm lifts it into something special. Autumn dusk is a great time to start watching out for starling gatherings. I love observing and listening to the starlings just in the treetops and aerials of my neighbourhood, but we do also have a small local murmuration that I try to catch at least a few times in the season. Here’s how he describes their magic: “At a time when, both as a society and as individuals, we are less and less in touch with the natural world, attending this fleeting but memorable event is a way we can reconnect, regain our primal sense of wonder – and still be home in time for tea.”
With thanks to Square Peg, an imprint of Vintage (Penguin Random House) for the free copy for review.
The Alcestis Machine by Carolyn Oliver
Carolyn is a blogger friend whose first collection, Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble, was on my Best Books of 2022 list. Her second is again characterized by precise vocabulary and crystalline imagery, often related to etymology, book history, or pigments (“You and I are marginalia shadowed / by a careless hand, we are gall-soaked vellum / invisible appetites consume.”). Astronomy and technology are a counterpoint, juxtaposing the ancient and the cutting-edge. I loved the language of sea creatures in “Strange Attractor” and the oblique approach to the passage of time (“Three popes ago, you and I”). The repeated three-word opening “In another life” gives a sense of many worlds, e.g., “In another life I’m a florist sometimes accused of inappropriate gravity.” Prose poems relay childhood memories. Love poems are tantalizing and utterly original: “If I promise not to describe the moon, will you / come with me a ways further into the night? / We’ll wash the forest floor / of ash and find a fairy ring / half-eaten, muted crescent bereft of power.” And alliteration never fails to win me over: “Tonight, snow tumbles over sophomores and starlings” and “the pillars in the water make a pillory not a pier”. Some of the collection remained cryptic for me; there was a bit less that grabbed me emotionally. But it’s still stirring work. And how flabbergasted was I to spot my name in the Acknowledgments? (Read via Edelweiss)
The Holy & Broken Bliss: Poems in Plague Time by Alicia Ostriker
“The words of an old woman shuffling the cards of her own decline the decline
of her husband the decline of her nation her plague-smitten world”
Out of pandemic isolation come new rituals: watching days and seasons pass, fighting for her own health but mostly her husband’s, and lamenting public displays of hate. Lines feel stark with honesty; some poems are just haiku length. Elsewhere, repetition and alliteration create a wistful tone. Jewish scripture and mysticism are the source of much of the language and outlook. Music and nature, too, promise the transcendent. Simple and remarkable. Here’s a stanza about late autumn:
It is almost winter and still
as I walk to the clinic the gingkos
sing their seraphic air
as if there is no tomorrow
With thanks to Alice James Books for the advanced e-copy for review.
Forces of Nature by Edward Steed
Steed is a longtime New Yorker cartoonist who produces single panels. This means there is no story progression (as in a graphic novel), just what you see on one page. Some of the comics are wordless; many scenes are visual gags which, to be entirely honest, I didn’t always grasp. Steed’s recurring characters are unhappy couples, exiles on desert islands, and dumb cops or criminals. His style is deliberately simplistic: the people not much more advanced than stick figures and the animals especially sketchy. There are multiple attempted prison breaks and satirical depictions of God and the Garden of Eden. Many of the setups are contrived, and the tone can be absurd or prickly, even shading into gruesome. These comics weren’t altogether my cup of tea, though I did get a laugh out of a few of them (a seasonal example is below). Endorsed if you fancy a cross between Edward Gorey and The Book of Bunny Suicides.
With thanks to Drawn & Quarterly for the e-copy for review.
Reviewed for BookBrowse:
Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner – “No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister” is a wry aphorism that appears late in Lerner’s debut novel. Over the course of two decades, there is much heartache for the Shred family, but also moments of joy. Ultimately, a sisterly bond endures despite secrets, betrayals, and intermittent estrangement. Through her psychologically astute portrait of Olivia (“Ollie”) and Amy Shred, Lerner captures the lasting effects that mental illness can have on not just an individual, but an entire family.
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
The Worst Journey in the World, Volume 1: Making Our Easting Down: The Graphic Novel by Sarah Airriess – The thrilling opening to a cinematically vivid adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s 1922 memoir. He was an assistant zoologist on Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910-13 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. Even before the ship entered the pack ice, the journey was perilous. The book resembles a full-color storyboard for a Disney-style maritime adventure film. There is jolly camaraderie as the men sing sea shanties to boost morale. The second volume can’t arrive soon enough.
Autumn Reads: Don Freeman, Seamus Heaney, Jo Lindley, Alice Oseman
I keep a whole box full of future seasonal reads. Winter is the largest contingent because it includes Christmas, cold, snow and ice; followed by summer, which also covers heat, sun and so on. Every once in a while, I’ll come across a spring-related book. Autumn may be great for misty canal walks, vibrant leaves and variegated squashes, but it’s the hardest of the seasons to find books for. I’ve read all the obvious ones by now. Some of the below connections are more abstract but not too much of a stretch, I hope.
Corduroy by Don Freeman (1968)
Autumn is when I wear the most corduroy, sometimes (accidentally) head to toe.
I knew I’d read this as a child, but didn’t expect individual pages to feel so familiar. It must have been on frequent rotation in my house growing up. Corduroy the bear is among the toys on offer in a large department store. One morning Lisa, a little Black girl, picks him out, but her mother says no, they’ve spent too much already – and besides, the toy is damaged. He didn’t realize until her mother said: his green overall is missing a button. That night he rides the escalator to go look for the button, thinking he’ll never be loved until he’s complete. His adventure doesn’t turn out as planned, but Lisa hasn’t stopped thinking about him. Long before Toy Story, here was a sweet book about what toys get up to when we’re not around. And the repeated expressions of the bear’s meek wonderment – “This must be home,” “You must be a friend” – gave me the warm fuzzies. (Little Free Library)
Field Work by Seamus Heaney (1979)
Harvest is a secondary theme in this poetry collection, which also has an overall melancholy tone that seems appropriate to the season of All Souls. Two poems are headed “In Memoriam” and another is titled “Elegy.” Even when they are not the stated topic, the Troubles rear up, as in the first section of “Triptych”: “Two young men with rifles on the hill, / Profane and bracing as their instruments. // Who’s sorry for our trouble?” The countryside can nevermore be an idyll when armoured cars and bombs could be anywhere. “The end of art is peace,” a late line from “The Harvest Bow,” may well be the poet’s motto (so long as “end” is interpreted as “goal”). There is a sequence of 10 sonnets and several poems devoted to animals. I experience Heaney’s poetry as linguistically fertile and formally rigorous; probably best heard out loud. (Secondhand – Oxfam, Marlborough)
Autumnal passages I marked:
“We toe the line / between the tree in leaf and the bare tree.” (from “September Song”)
“the sunflower, dreaming umber” (from “Field Work”)
“A rowan like a lipsticked girl” (from “Song”)
“the sunset blaze / of straw on blackened stubble, a thatch-deep, freshening barbarous crimson burn” (from “Leavings”)
But none of those stood out to me as much as “Oysters,” the opening poem, which I photographed here. I’ve read and savoured every line of it five times now. It’s gold.
Hello Autumn by Jo Lindley (2023)
Depicted as elfin children, the seasons take turns wearing a single crown. Autumn is a timid soul worried about what might go wrong. But when one of the others is at risk, he rushes to help even if it might take him outside his comfort zone. By doing so, he realizes how much there is to enjoy in every season. This is part of a didactic series (Little Seasons/Best Friends with Big Feelings) about coping with anxiety. I’m surprised it wasn’t classified in the mostly-nonfiction “Family Matters” section of the children’s library, which includes books on feelings, illnesses, death, divorce, siblings, first experiences, etc. It was a little heavy-handed for me and I wasn’t sure why the characters had to be elves. (Public library)
Heartstopper: Volume 1 by Alice Oseman (2019)
I’ve been rereading the series through the hardback reissue; I’m now on Volume 5 (and WHERE is Volume 6, huh?). I’ve included the first book because of the falling leaves motif on the cover, which fits the back-to-school vibe. (Public library)
What I thought this time: Just as cute the second time around. All the looks, all the blushes, all the angst! I’d forgotten the details of how Nick and Charlie met and got together. Single best page: when Tori appears out of nowhere and says to Charlie of Nick, “I don’t think he’s straight.”
Original review: It’s well known at Truham boys’ school that Charlie is gay. Luckily, the bullying has stopped and the others accept him. Nick, who sits next to Charlie in homeroom, even invites him to join the rugby team. Charlie is smitten right away, but it takes longer for Nick, who’s only ever liked girls before, to sort out his feelings. This black-and-white YA graphic novel is pure sweetness, taking me right back to the days of high school crushes.
R.I.P., Part II: Duy Đoàn, T. Kingfisher & Rachael Smith
A second installment for the Readers Imbibing Peril challenge (first was a creepy short story collection). Zombies link my first two selections, an experimental poetry collection and a historical novella that updates a classic, followed by a YA graphic novel about a medieval witch who appears in contemporary life to help a teen deal with her problems. I don’t really do proper horror; I’d characterize all three of these as more mischievous than scary.
Zombie Vomit Mad Libs by Duy Đoàn
The Vietnamese American poet’s second collection strikes a balance between morbid – a pair of sonnets chants the names and years of poets who died by suicide – and playful. Multiple poems titled “Zombie” or “Zombies” are composed of just 1–3 cryptic lines. Other repeated features are blow-by-blow descriptions of horror movie scenes and the fill-in-the-blank Mad Libs format. There is an obsession with Leslie Cheung, a gay Hong Kong actor who also died by suicide, in 2003. Đoàn experiments linguistically as well as thematically, by adding tones (as used in Vietnamese) to English words. This was a startling collection I admired for its range and pluck, though I found little to personally latch on to. I was probably expecting something more like 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le. But if you think poetry can’t get better than zombies + linguistics + suicides, boy have I got the collection for you! (Đoàn’s first book, We Play a Game, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and a Lambda Literary Award for bisexual poetry.)
To be published in the USA by Alice James Books on November 12. With thanks to the publisher for the advanced e-copy for review.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher (2022)
{MILD SPOILERS AHEAD}
This first book in the “Sworn Soldier” duology is a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Set in the 1890s, it’s narrated by Alex Easton, a former Gallacian soldier who learns that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying and goes to visit her at her and her brother Roderick’s home in Ruritania. Easton also meets the Ushers’ friend, the American doctor Denton, and Eugenia Potter, an amateur mycologist (and aunt of a certain Beatrix). Easton and Potter work out that what is making Madeline ill is the same thing that’s turning the local rabbits into zombies…
At first it seemed the author was awkwardly inserting a nonbinary character into history, but it’s more complicated than that. The sworn soldier tradition in countries such as Albania was a way for women, especially orphans or those who didn’t have brothers to advocate for them, to have autonomy in martial, patriarchal cultures. Kingfisher makes up European nations and their languages, as well as special sets of pronouns to refer to soldiers (ka/kan), children (va/van), etc. She doesn’t belabour the world-building, just sketches in the bits needed.
This was a quick and reasonably engaging read, though I wasn’t always amused by Kingfisher’s gleefully anachronistic tone (“Mozart? Beethoven? Why are you asking me? It was music, it went dun-dun-dun-DUN, what more do you want me to say?”). I wondered if the plot might have been inspired by a detail in Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, but it seems more likely it’s a half-conscious addition to a body of malevolent-mushroom stories (Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, various by Jeff VanderMeer, The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley). I was drawn in by Easton’s voice and backstory enough to borrow the sequel, about which more anon. (T. Kingfisher is the pen name of Ursula Vernon.) (Public library)
Isabella & Blodwen by Rachael Smith (2023)
I’d reviewed Smith’s adult graphic memoirs Quarantine Comix (mental health during Covid) and Glass Half Empty (alcoholism and bereavement) for Foreword and Shelf Awareness, respectively. When I spotted this in the Young Adult section and saw it was about a witch, I mentally earmarked it for R.I.P. Isabella Maria Penwick-Wickam is a precocious 16-year-old student at Oxford. With her fixation on medieval history and folklore, she has the academic side of the university experience under control. But her social life is hopeless. She’s alienated flatmates and classmates alike with her rigid habits and judgemental comments. On a field trip to the Pitt Rivers Museum, where students are given a rare opportunity to handle artefacts, she accidentally drops a silver bottle into her handbag. Before she can return it, its occupant, a genie-like blowsy blue-and-purple witch named Blodwen, is released into the world. She wreaks much merry havoc, encouraging Issy to have some fun and make friends.
It’s a sweet enough story, but a few issues detracted from my enjoyment. Issy is often depicted more like a ten-year-old. I don’t love the blocky and exaggerated features Smith gives her characters, or the Technicolor hues. And I found myself rolling my eyes at how the book unnaturally inserts a sexual harassment theme – which Blodwen responds to in modern English, having spoken in archaic fashion up to that point, and with full understanding of the issue of consent. I can imagine younger teens enjoying this, though. (Public library)
The mini playlist I had going through my mind as I wrote this:
- “Running with Zombies” by The Bookshop Band (inspired by The Making of Zombie Wars by Aleksandar Hemon)
- “Flesh and Blood Dance” by Duke Special
- “Dead Alive” by The Shins
And to counterbalance the evil fungi of the Kingfisher novella, here’s Anne-Marie Sanderson employing the line “A mycelium network is listening to you” in a totally non-threatening way. It’s one of the multiple expressions of reassurance in her lovely song “All Your Atoms,” my current earworm from her terrific new album Old Light.
Summer Reading, Part II: Beanland, Watters; O’Farrell, Oseman Rereads
Apparently the UK summer officially extends to the 22nd – though you’d never believe it from the autumnal cold snap we’re having just now – so that’s my excuse for not posting about the rest of my summery reading until today. I have a tender ancestry-inspired story of a Jewish family’s response to grief, a bizarre YA fantasy comic, and two rereads, one a family story from one of my favourite contemporary authors and the other the middle instalment in a super-cute graphic novel series.
Florence Adler Swims Forever by Rachel Beanland (2020)
After reviewing Beanland’s second novel, The House Is on Fire, I wanted to catch up on her debut. Both are historical and give a broad but detailed view of a particular milieu and tragic event through the use of multiple POVs. It’s the summer of 1934 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Florence, a plucky college student who intends to swim the English Channel, drowns on one of her practice swims. This happens in the first chapter (and is announced in the blurb), so the rest is aftermath. The Adlers make the unusual decision to keep Florence’s death from her sister, Fannie, who is on hospital bedrest during her third pregnancy because she lost a premature baby last year. Fannie’s seven-year-old daughter, Gussie, is sworn to silence about her aunt – with Stuart, the lifeguard who loved Florence, and Anna, a German refugee the Adlers have sponsored, turning it into a game for her by creating the top-secret “Florence Adler Swims Forever Society” with its own language.
The particulars can be chalked up to family history: this really happened; the Gussie character was Beanland’s grandmother, and the author believes her great-great-aunt Florence died of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It’s intriguing to get glimpses of Jewish ritual, U.S. anti-Semitism and early concern over Nazism, but I was less engaged with other subplots such as Fannie’s husband Isaac’s land speculation in Florida. There’s a satisfying queer soupcon, and Beanland capably inhabits all of the perspectives and the bereaved mindset. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
Lumberjanes: Campfire Songs by Shannon Watters et al. (2020)
This comics series created by a Boom! Studios editor ran from 2014 to 2020 and stretched to 75 issues that have been collected in 20+ volumes. Watters wanted to create a girl-centric comic and roped in various writers who together decided on the summer scout camp setting. I didn’t really know what I was getting into with this set of six stand-alone stories, each illustrated by a different artist. The characters are recognizably the same across the stories, but the variation in style meant I didn’t know what they’re “supposed” to look like. All are female or nonbinary, including queer and trans characters. I guess I expected queer coming-of-age stuff, but this is more about friendship and fantastical adventures. Other worlds are just a few steps away. They watch the Northern Lights with a pair of yeti, attend a dinner party cooked by a ghost chef, and play with green kittens and giant animate pumpkins. My favourite individual story was “A Midsummer Night’s Scheme,” in which Puck the fairy interferes with preparations for a masquerade ball. I won’t bother reading other installments. (Public library) 
And the rereads:
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell (2013)
I read this when it first came out (original review here) and saw O’Farrell speak on it, in conversation with Julie Cohen, at a West Berkshire Libraries event – several years before I lived in the county. I expected it to be a little more atmospheric about the infamous UK drought of summer 1976. All I’d remembered otherwise was that one character is hiding illiteracy and another has an affair while leading a residential field trip. The novel opens, Harold Fry-like, with Robert Riordan disappearing from his suburban home. Gretta phones each of her adult children to express concern, but she’s so focussed on details like how she’ll get into the shed without Robert’s key that she fails to convey the gravity of the situation. Eventually the three descend on her from London, Gloucestershire and New York and travel to Ireland together to find him, but much of the novel is a patient filling-in of backstory: why Monica and Aoife are estranged, what went wrong in Michael Francis’s marriage, and so on.
I had forgotten the two major reveals, but this time they didn’t seem as important as the overall sense of decisions with unforeseen consequences. O’Farrell was using extreme weather as a metaphor for risk and cause-and-effect (“a heatwave will act upon people. It lays them bare, it wears down their guard. They start behaving not unusually but unguardedly”), and it mostly works. But this wasn’t a top-tier O’Farrell on a reread. (Little Free Library)
My original rating (2013):
My rating now:
Average:
Heartstopper: Volume 3 by Alice Oseman (2020)
Heartstopper was my summer crush back in 2021, and I couldn’t resist rereading the series in the hardback reissue. That I started with the middle volume (original review here) is an accident of when my library holds arrived for me, but it turned out to be an apt read for the Olympics summer because it mostly takes place during a one-week school trip to Paris, full of tourism, ice cream, hijinks and romance. Nick and Charlie are dating but still not out to everyone in their circle. This is particularly true for Nick, who is a jock and passes as straight but is actually bisexual. Charlie experienced a lot of bullying at his boys’ school before his coming-out, so he’s nervous for Nick, and the psychological effects persist in his disordered eating. Oseman deals sensitively with mental health issues here, and has fun adding more queer stories into the background: Darcy and Tara, Tao and Elle (trans), and even the two male trip chaperones. It’s adorable how everything flirtation-related is so dramatic and the characters are always blushing and second-guessing. Lucky teens who get to read this at the right time. (Public library) 
Any final “heat” or “summer” books for you this year?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 