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)
March Releases by Akbar, Bosker, García Márquez, and Wrenn
I’m catching up after a busy end to last month. Today I have an uneven debut novel from a poet whose work I’ve enjoyed before, a journalist’s jaunty submersion in the world of modern art, a posthumous novella from a famous Colombian author I’d not previously read, and a (literally) trippy memoir about C-PTSD, coral, climate breakdown, queerness and more. I can pinpoint a couple of elements that some or all of them have in common: beauty (whether in art or in nature) and dead mothers.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
I’d read the Iranian American poet’s two full-length collections and particularly admired Pilgrim Bell, one of my favourite books of 2021. That was enough for me to put this on my Most Anticipated list for 2024, even though based on the synopsis I wrote: “His debut novel sounds kind of unhinged, but I figure it’s worth a try.” Here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s blurb: “When Cyrus’s obsession with the lives of the martyrs – Bobby Sands, Joan of Arc – leads him to a chance encounter with a dying artist, he finds himself drawn towards the mysteries of an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of Death; and toward his [late] mother, who may not have been who or what she seemed.”
Cyrus Shams is an Iranian American aspiring poet who grew up in Indiana with a single father, his mother Roya having died in a passenger aircraft mistakenly shot down by a U.S. Navy missile cruiser (this really happened: Iran Air Flight 655, on 3 July 1988). He continues to lurk around the Keady University campus, working as a medical actor at the hospital, but his ambition is to write. During his shaky recovery from drug and alcohol abuse, he undertakes a project that seems divinely inspired: “Tired of interventionist pyrotechnics like burning bushes and locust plagues, maybe God now worked through the tired eyes of drunk Iranians in the American Midwest”. By seeking the meaning in others’ deaths, he hopes his modern “Book of Martyrs” will teach him how to cherish his own life.
This document, which we see in fragments, sets up hypothetical dialogues between figures real and imaginary, dead and living, and intersperses them with poems and short musings. But when a friend tells Cyrus about the Brooklyn Museum installation “DEATH-SPEAK,” which has terminally ill Iranian artist Orkideh living out her last days in public, he spies an opportunity to move the work beyond theory and into the physical realm. So he flies to New York City with his best friend (and occasional f**kbuddy), bartender Zee Novak, and visits Orkideh every day until the installation’s/artist’s end.
This is a wildly original but unruly novel with a few problems. One: Akbar has clung too obviously to his own story and manner of speaking with Cyrus (e.g., “I honestly actually do worry about that, no joke. Being a young Iranian man making a book about martyrdom, going around talking to people about becoming a martyr. It’s not inert, you know?”). Another is that the poems, and poetic descriptions, are much the best material. The only exception might be a zany scene where Zee and Cyrus chop wood while high. But the main issue I had is that the plot turns on a twist 50 pages from the end, a huge coincidence that feels unearned. I admire the ambition Akbar had for this – a seething, open-hearted enquiry into addiction, love, suicide and queerness – but look forward to him getting back to poetry.
With thanks to Picador for the proof copy for review.
Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See by Bianca Bosker
I was a big fan of Bosker’s Cork Dork (2017), her deep dive into the world of fine wine. Her second book is similarly constructed and equally fun: more personal than authoritative, light yet substantial, and accessible to the uninitiated as well as those with an existing interest in the subject. She begins as a complete novice, wondering if she’ll ever know what art is, let alone what it means and whether it’s any good (“the familiar feeling that everyone got the punch line except me”). By the end, she has discovered that, like the love of wine, art appreciation can be a way of expanding and savouring one’s life.
The aim was to get the broadest experience possible, generally through voluntary placements. She started out as an assistant at Jack Barrett’s 315 Gallery, where one of her tasks was to paint a wall white; she failed miserably to meet his expectations even for this simple task. He never lost his fundamental distrust of her, a writer and outsider, as one of “the enemy.” It was expected that she would attend as many art shows and openings as possible per week. “Talking shit was essentially a job requirement.” Bosker might not have known what to make of the art, but others were gossipy, snobbish and opinionated enough to make up for it. When she was tasked with writing a press release for an exhibit, a gallerist taught her the clichéd shorthand: “Every f**king artist allegedly transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar, or vice versa.”
In the course of the book, the New York City-based author also:
- attends the Art Basel Miami Beach contemporary art fair and sells photographs on behalf of Denny Dimin Gallery;
- befriends performance artist and “ass influencer” Mandy AllFIRE, who – ahem – sits on Bosker’s face as part of a temporary installment;
- serves as a studio assistant for French painter Julie Curtiss, whose work is selling for alarmingly high amounts at auction (not actually what a painter wants, as it tends to signal bad things for a career);
- meets a pair of North Dakota collectors known as “the Icy Gays”; and
- works as a Guggenheim Museum guard.
This last was my favourite episode. Forty-minute placements on particular ramps gave her time to focus on one chosen artwork – for instance, an abstract sculpture. She challenged herself to stay with it for that whole time, doing as one artist advised and simply noticing five things about the work. Before, her “default approach to art had just been to plant myself in front of a piece and wait for the epiphany to wash over me.” Now, she worked at it. In fact, she counsels newcomers to not read a caption because many people take a title at face value and an interpretation as gospel, and so don’t experience the art for themselves.
At times I found the book slightly scattered in the way that it zigzags from one challenge to another. There’s differing attention to various experiences; a week-long art school merits just one paragraph. And there’s no getting past the fact that some art she encounters sounds outlandish or just plain silly. (Is it any surprise that she mistakes part of a wall, and a mousetrap, for art pieces?) Ultimately, I think it’s best if you have at least a modicum of appreciation for modern art, which I don’t; whereas I do enjoy drinking wine even if I don’t have a trained palate.
Even so, Bosker’s writing has such verve (“artists were coyly evasive about their work and treated my questions like I was a cactus running after their balloon”; “a hazy daydream of an idea solidified into a yappy, un-shut-uppable chihuahua of want”) that you’ll be glad you went along for the ride. She concludes that taste is subjective, but “Beauty … pulls you close.” Art is valuable because it “knocks us off our well-worn pathways” into something uncharted, a tantalizing prospect.
With thanks to Allen & Unwin (Grove Press) for the free copy for review.
{SPOILERS IN THIS NEXT ONE}
Until August by Gabriel García Márquez
[Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean]
A posthumous ‘lost’ novella was not a good place for me to have started with this celebrated author. García Márquez okayed the fifth draft of the text in 2004, 10 years before his death. By this time he was already suffering with memory loss that interfered with his creativity. His sons got the message that he didn’t think the book worked and should be destroyed. But they didn’t do his bidding and, revisiting the book nearly a decade on from his death, decided it wasn’t that bad, if not up to the standard of his best work, and that it should see the light of day after all.
Every August 16th, Ana Magdalena Bach travels to the island where her mother is buried to visit the grave and lay gladioli on it. (My review book came with a bag of three gladioli bulbs and a mini Colombian chocolate bar.) Each year she takes a different lover for the one night at a hotel. The first time, the man leaves her a $20 bill and she feels ashamed, but it doesn’t stop her doing the same thing again for the next four years in a row. Once it’s a long-ago school friend whom she runs into on the ferry. Another time, by golly, it’s a bishop.
It’s refreshing to have a woman in middle age as protagonist and for her to claim sexual freedom. However, the setup is formulaic and repetitive, the sex scenes are somewhat excruciating, and the hypocrisy of her gleefully having one-night stands while fretting over her husband’s potential infidelity is grating. I did like the ending – Ana hears that an anonymous elderly gentleman has been paying to have gladioli laid on her mother’s grave year-round and she wonders if she is in a sense following in her mother’s footsteps all along without knowing it; and decides she’s had enough and exhumes her mother’s remains, returning to her husband with a bag of bones (gruesome!).
But nothing about the plot or the writing – fluid enough bar one awkward sentence (“She listened to him worried that he meant it, but she had the strength not to appear as easy a woman as he might think”) – suggested to me a master at work. At best, this might be reminiscent of the late work of misogynist-leaning authors like Coetzee or Updike.
In my mind García Márquez is linked with magic realism, so I’d be better off trying one of his more representative works. I have several of his earlier novellas on the shelf (received as review copies as part of the same recent marketing push), and if I get on better with those then I’ll be sure to try one of the most famous full-length novels. 
With thanks to Viking (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis by Greg Wrenn
Wrenn is an associate English professor teaching environmental literature at James Madison University. He has also been exploring coral reefs for 25 years, with a love of marine wildlife sparked by growing up in Florida. But all along, he’s been trying (much like Cyrus Shams) to come to terms with addiction, queerness, suicidal inclinations, and especially his mother’s place in his life. She made him feel dirty, that he would never be good enough; she hit him with a wooden spoon and bathed him until he was 17. Though he never found out for sure, he suspects his mother was sexually abused by her father and repeated the cycle of molestation.
This is the third C-PTSD memoir I’ve read (after What My Bones Know and A Flat Place), and has a lot in common with I’m Glad My Mom Died, which features a co-dependent relationship with an abusive mother. After Wrenn’s parents’ divorce, he and his mother remained close. “I had been her therapist, confessor, girlfriend, and punching bag.” He helped care for her after a stroke but eventually had to throw up his hands at her stubborn refusal to follow doctors’ orders. Drawing on the Greek etymology of ecology (oikos means house or family), Wrenn insists on a parallel between the personal and the environmental here: “What we’re facing amounts to global C-PTSD” as “Mother” Earth turns against us. On each trip to Raja Ampat, he knows the coral reef is dying, his carbon footprint only accelerating it.
There’s a lot in this short memoir. Even the summary had me shaking my head in disbelief. For me, though, the tone and style were too erratic. Wrenn can be wry, sorrowful, or campy; he includes scientific data, letters to Adrienne Rich and an imagined descendent, a chapter riffing on “Otters” (the animal and the gay stereotype), flashbacks, and E.T. metaphors. The final third of the book then takes a left turn as he experiments with therapeutic psychedelics via ayahuasca ceremonies in South America, and ditches dating apps and casual sex to try to find a long-term relationship. The drug literally alters his brain, allowing him to feel trust and love. Add on nature and a husband and that’s why he’s still here rather than dead by suicide.
Like Akbar, Wrenn published poetry before switching genre. Their books are both amazing in premise but wobbly in execution. Still, I’d say both authors are laudable for their effort to depict lives wrenched back from extremity. 
With thanks to Regalo Press (USA) for the proof copy for review.
Carol Shields Prize Longlist Reading: The Future and Chrysalis
My first two dedicated reads for our informal Carol Shields Prize shadowing project exhibit one main way in which the prize is different from the Women’s Prize for Fiction: works in translation and short story collections are eligible. I have one of each to review today. Laura and I did a buddy read of an atmospheric dystopian novel translated from the French, and I caught up on a magical, erotic story collection I’d had on my Kindle for a long time. These were both very good, but my minor misgivings are such that I’d rate them the same:
The Future by Catherine Leroux (2020; 2023)
[Translated from the French by Susan Ouriou]
For such a monolithic title, this has a limited stage: a few derelict districts of the ailing city we know as Detroit, Michigan – but in Leroux’s alternate version, it remained part of French Canada, with lingering Indigenous influence, and so is known as Fort Détroit. No doubt she was inspired by the many vacant properties that characterized Detroit in the 2010s; there’s even a ruins tour bus. In her Fort Détroit, a handful of determined adults cling on in their own homes, but the streets and parks have been abandoned to animals and to a gang of half-feral children who have developed their own nicknames (Adidas, Lego, Wolfpup), social hierarchy and vernacular. Worlds meet when Gloria determines to find her granddaughters Cassandra and Mathilda, who ran away after their addict mother Judith’s suspicious death. At the same time, her neighbour Eunice wants to find out who ran her father down in the street.
Despite their fierce independence and acts of protest, the novel’s children still rely on the adult world. Ecosystems are awry and the river is toxic, but Gloria’s friend Solomon, a former jazz pianist, still manages to grow crops. He overlooks the children’s thefts from his greenhouse and eventually offers to help them grow their own food supply, and other adults volunteer to prepare a proper winter shelter to replace their shantytown. Puberty threatens their society, too: we learn that Fiji, the leader, has been binding her breasts to hide her age.
I expected to be reminded strongly of Station Eleven, and while there were elements that were reminiscent of Emily St John Mandel’s work, Leroux’s is a more consciously literary approach. The present-tense omniscient narration occupies many perspectives, including that of a dog, and the descriptions and musings are more lyrical than literal. Where another author would site high drama – sixtysomething Gloria’s night quest, a few children rafting down the river – Leroux moves on swiftly to other character interactions. What did bring Mandel to mind was the importance of art during societal collapse: the children spin nursery rhyme mash-ups and fairytales, Stutt rescues a makeshift library and insists on Huckleberry Finn going along on the river journey, and Solomon plays the piano again after decades.
The opening mysteries of death and disappearance are resolved before the end, but don’t seem to have been the point. The Future is more subtle and slippery than many dystopian novels I’ve read in that there’s not really a warning, or a message here. Instead, there’s an intriguing situation that opens out and alters slightly, but avoids resolution. It’s all about atmosphere and language – I was especially impressed by Ouriou’s rendering of Leroux’s made-up dialect via folksy slang (“She figgers she’s growed-up”). I loved the details and one-on-one moments more than the momentous scenes. On the whole, I found the story elegant but somewhat frustrating. You might be drawn to it if you enjoyed To Paradise or the MaddAddam books. (Read via Edelweiss; published by Biblioasis)
See also Laura’s review.
Chrysalis: Stories by Anuja Varghese (2023)
This debut collection of 15 stories brims with magic and horror, and teems with women of colour and queer people. Indeed, Varghese dedicates the book to “all the girls and women who don’t see themselves in most stories.” Most of the characters are of South Asian extraction. Adoption recurs in a couple of places. Two of the rarer realist stories, “Milk” and “Stories in the Language of the Fist,” have protagonists dealing with schoolgirl bullying and workplace microaggressions. More often, there are unexplained phenomena that position the players between life and death. “In the Bone Fields” focuses on the twin daughters of an Indian immigrant family on a Canadian farm. The house and the bone field behind are active and hungry, and only one twin will survive. (I got mild North Woods vibes.)
In the title story, Radhika visits her mother’s grave and wonders whether her life is here in Montreal with her lover or back in Toronto with her husband. Fangs and wings symbolize her desire for independence. Elsewhere, watery metaphors alternately evoke fear of drowning or sexual fluidity. “Midnight at the Oasis” charts the transformation of a trans woman and “Cherry Blossom Fever,” one of my two favourites, bounces between several POVs. Marjan is in love with Talia, but she’s married to Sunil, who’s also in love with Silas. “People do it — open their relationships and negotiate rules and write themselves into polyamorous fairy tales … Other people. Not brown people,” Talia sighs. They are better off, at least, than they would be back in India, where homophobia can be deadly (“The Vetala’s Song”).
My other favourite was “Bhupati,” about a man who sets up multiple Lakshmi figures in the backyard, hoping devotion will earn him and his wife a better future. The statues keep being burned up by lightning; we learn his wife may be petitioning for different things. “Chitra” is a straightforward Cinderella retelling whose title character lives with two mean stepsisters and works in food service at the mall. A Shoe Chateau BOGO closing sale gives her the chance to get a bargain – and catch the manager’s eye. Despite a striking ending signalled by the story’s subtitle, all I could conclude about this one was “cute.” The three flash horror stories (a murder hotel, ghosts in a basement, werewolves) were much the weakest for me.
There’s a pretty even split of third- and first-person stories (nine versus six) here, and the genre shifts frequently. The quality wasn’t as consistent as I’d hoped, but it was an engaging read. The overall blend of feminism and horror had me thinking of Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, but I’d be most likely to recommend this to fans of Julia Armfield, Violet Kupersmith and Vauhini Vara. (Read via Edelweiss; published by House of Anansi Press)
Both of these are worthwhile books and it’s great that readers outside of Canada can discover them. I wouldn’t personally shortlist either, but the judges may well be dazzled enough to do so. I don’t yet have a sense of where they’d fit for me in the rankings.
Up next:
Cocktail by Lisa Alward (short story collection from Edelweiss)
A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power (buddy read with Laura)
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang (from library)
I’m aiming for one or two more batches of reviews before the shortlist is announced on 9 April.
Reading Ireland Month: Seán Hewitt, Maggie O’Farrell
Reading Ireland Month is hosted each year by Cathy of 746 Books. I’m wishing you all well on St. Patrick’s Day with this first of two planned tie-in posts. Today I have a poetry collection that sets grief and queer longing amid nature, and my last unread novel – a somewhat middling one, unfortunately – by one of my favourite authors.
Rapture’s Road by Seán Hewitt (2024)
The points of reference are so similar to his 2020 debut collection, Tongues of Fire, that parts of what I wrote about that one are fully applicable here: “Sex and grief, two major themes, are silhouetted against the backdrop of nature. Fields and forests are loci of meditation and epiphany, but also of clandestine encounters between men.” Perhaps inevitably, then, this felt less fresh, but there was still much to enjoy. I particularly loved two poems about moths (the merveille du jour as an “art-deco mint-green herringbone. Soft furred little absinthe warrior”), “To Autumn,” and “Alcyone,” which likens a kingfisher to “a rip / in the year’s old fabric”.
In “Two Apparitions,” the poet’s late father seems visible again. Many of the scenes take place at dusk or dark. There’s a layer of menace to “Night-Scented Stock,” about an abusive relationship, and the account of a slaughter in “Pig.” But the stand-out is “We Didn’t Mean to Kill Mr Flynn,” based on the 1982 murder of a gay man in a Dublin park. Hewitt drew lines from court proceedings and periodicals in the Irish Queer Archive at the National Library of Ireland, where he was poet in residence. He voices first the gang of killers, then Flynn himself. The trial kickstarted Ireland’s Pride movement.
More favourite lines:
Come out, make a verb of me, let
my body do your speaking tonight —
(from “A Strain of the Earth’s Sweet Being”)
awestruck, bright,
a child in the bell-tower of beauty —
(from “Skylarks”)
Love, the world is failing:
come and fail with me.
(from “Nightfall”)
With thanks to Jonathan Cape (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
My Lover’s Lover by Maggie O’Farrell (2002)
I was so excited, a few years ago, to find battered copies of this and After You’d Gone in a local charity shop for 50 pence each, even though it appears a mouse had a nibble on one corner here. They were her first two books, but the last that I managed to source. Whereas After You’d Gone is a surprisingly confident and elegant debut novel about a woman in a coma and the family and romantic relationships that brought her to this point, My Lover’s Lover ultimately felt like a pretty run-of-the-mill story about two women finding out that (some) men are dogs and they need to break free.
Lily meets Marcus, an architect, at a party and almost before she knows it has moved into the spare room of his apartment, a Victorian factory space he renovated himself, and become his lover. But there’s an uncomfortable atmosphere in the flat: She can still smell perfume from Marcus’s ex, Sinead; one of her dresses hangs in the closet. We, along with Lily, get the impression Sinead has died. She haunts not just the flat but also the streets of London. It becomes Lily’s obsession to find out what happened to Sinead and why Marcus is so morose. Part Two gives Sinead’s side of things, in a mix of third person/present tense and first person/past tense, before we return to Lily to see what she’ll do with her new knowledge.
As in some later novels, there are multiple locales (here, NYC, the Australian desert, and China – a country O’Farrell often revisits in fiction) and complicated point-of-view shifts, but I felt the sophisticated craft was rather wasted on a book that boils down to a self-explanatory maxim: past relationships always have an effect on current ones. I also found the writing overmuch in places (“the grass swooshing, sussurating, cleaving open to her steps”; “letting fall a box of cereal into its [a shopping trolley’s] chrome meshing”; “her fingertips meeting the ceraceous, heated skin of his cheek”). However, this was an engrossing read – I read most of it in two days. It’s bottom-tier O’Farrell, though, along with The Distance Between Us and Hamnet – sorry, I know many adore it. (If you’re interested: middle tier = The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Instructions for a Heatwave, her two children’s books, and The Marriage Portrait; top tier = After You’d Gone, The Hand that First Held Mine, This Must Be the Place, and I Am, I Am, I Am.)
I’ve gotten in the habit of reading one of Maggie O’Farrell’s works per year, so I will just have to reread my favourites until we get a new one. I’m already tapping a foot in impatience. (Secondhand from Bas, Newbury) 
Have you read any Irish literature this month?
Divisible by Itself and One by Kae Tempest: Dylan Thomas Prize Blog Tour
Divisible by Itself and One is Kae Tempest’s 14th book, its title referring to the definition of prime numbers. I’d read one of their previous collections, Let Them Eat Chaos, and enjoyed the performance poetry rhythms. There is a similar feel here – urban settings; internal and end rhymes – but more experimentation with theme, style and tone. Often the poet crosses casual speech with a formal approach: “Body” is composed of two nontraditional sonnets, while “The loop” is a villanelle. I also noted a repeated phrase as a fulcrum between the two stanzas of “Do it for the joy.”
The prose piece “Swear” features a heartbroken nonbinary god in the wreckage of the Garden of Eden: “Groaning in the empty garden in a moment that lasted till now, the almighty swore they’d never love again. And the words of the oath were famine, pestilence, genocide, flood.” It’s not the only biblical allusion; “Flood” references Noah and one epigraph is from Isaiah. Climate breakdown is a source of background dread, with “Even the youths shall faint and be weary” a sarcastic response to people’s relief at young people’s engagement with the environment – “Manaic adults peddling hope. Surely / the kids will sort it.”
“Wind in the tall trees” takes on a rough tree shape on the page. There are a couple of apparent break-up scenes, but a tentative new relationship fuels tender, mildly erotic love poems (“Flight” and “Fig”). The alliteration in “Pride” evokes a gradual coming to grips with gender identity: “Pride by degrees. It’s relative / I’ve carried my shame / like a drunk friend dragged / through the days of my life. / Damn dysphoria.” “Cocoon” envisions a transformation, which comes to fruition in the final poem, the LGBTQ manifesto “Love song for queens, studs, butches, daddies, fags and all the other angels.” Here the poet hymns queer heroes, then joins them. “You are the strongest ones among us. Daring as you do to live. Wholly as you are. While the rest of us go straight // to pieces for what we can’t bear to admit we carry.” What a fantastic tease that enjambment is.
I found more variety than cohesion here, but Tempest is likely to attract readers who wouldn’t usually turn to poetry. This is one I’d recommend to fans of Surge by Jay Bernard and Some Integrity by Padraig Regan.
More favourite lines:
“Why not stick it out with this insane human being, rather than dig it all up just to replant yourself in a parallel hole.” (from “Absurd”)
“life’s a chance to do.
It’s all been done before. We make it new” (from “Morning”)
With thanks to Picador and Midas PR for the free copy for review.
I’ve reviewed Dylan Thomas Prize-longlisted poetry in several previous years as well:
- Eye Level by Jenny Xie
- If All the World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton
- Auguries of a Minor God by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe
- Phantom Gang by Ciarán O’Rourke
I’ve now read three books from the longlist (the others are Bright Fear and Penance). The shortlist will be announced on 21 March, and the winner on 16 May. Look out for other bloggers’ posts between now and the 20th.
Three on a Theme: Matrescence Memoirs (and a Bonus Novel)
I think of pregnancy and childbirth like any extreme adventure (skydiving, polar exploration): wholly extraordinary experiences with much to recommend them – though better appreciated retrospectively than in the moment – to which my response is a hearty “no, thanks.” But just as books have taken me to deserts and the frozen north, miles above or below the earth, into many eras and cultures, they’ve long been my window onto motherhood.
Matrescence, a word coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s, is the process of becoming a mother. It’s a transition period, like adolescence, that involves radical physical and mental changes and has lasting effects. And as Lucy Jones reports, up to 45% of women describe childbirth as traumatic. That’s not a niche experience; it’s an epidemic. If it was men going through this, you can bet it would be at the top of international research agendas.
These three memoirs (and a bonus novel) are bold, often harrowing accounts of the metamorphosis involved in motherhood. They’re personal yet political in how they expose the lack of social support for creating and raising the next generation. All four of these 2023 releases are eye-opening, lyrical and vital; they deserve to be better known.
Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood by Lucy Jones
Like Jones’s previous book, Losing Eden, about climate breakdown and the human need for nature, Matrescence is a potent blend of scientific research and stories from the frontline. She has synthesized a huge amount of information into a tight 260-some pages that are structured thematically but also proceed roughly chronologically through her own matrescence. Not long into her pregnancy with her first child, a daughter, she realised the extent to which outdated and sexist expectations still govern motherhood: concepts like “natural childbirth” and “maternal instinct,” the judgemental requirement for exclusive breastfeeding, the idea that a parent should “enjoy every minute” of their offspring’s babyhood rather than admitting depression or overwhelm. After the cataclysm of birth, loneliness set in. “Matrescence was another country, another planet. I didn’t know how to talk about the existential crisis I was facing, or the confronting, encompassing relationship I was now in.”
Jones is now a mother of three. You might think delivery would get easier each time, but in fact the birth of her second son was worst, physically: she had to go into immediate surgery for a fourth-degree anal sphincter tear. In reflecting on her own experiences, and speaking with experts, she has become passionate about fostering open discussion about the pain and risk of childbirth, and how to mitigate them. Women who aren’t informed about what they might go through suffer more because of the shock and isolation. There’s the medical side, but also the equally important social implications: new mothers need so much more practical and mental health support, and their unpaid care work must be properly valued by society. “Yet the focus remains on individual responsibility, maintaining the illusion that we are impermeable, impenetrable machines, disconnected from the world around us.”
The hybrid nature of the book is its genius. A purely scientific approach might have been dry; a social history well-trod and worthy; a memoir too inward-looking to make wider points. Instead it’s equally committed to all three purposes. I appreciated the laser focus on her own physical and emotional development, but the statistical and theoretical context gives a sense of the universal. The literary touches – lists and word clouds, verse-like meditations and flash vignettes about natural phenomena – are not always successful, but there is a thrill to seeing Jones experimenting. Like Leah Hazard’s Womb, this is by no means a book that’s just for mothers; it’s for anyone who’s ever had a mother.
With thanks to Allen Lane (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Milk: On Motherhood and Madness by Alice Kinsella
Kinsella is an Irish poet who became a mother in her mid-twenties; that’s young these days. In unchronological vignettes dated in relation to her son’s birth – the number of months after; negative numbers to indicate that it happened before – she explores her personality, mental health and bodily experiences, but also comments more widely on Irish culture (the stereotype of the ‘mammy’; the only recent closure of Magdalene laundries and overturning of anti-abortion laws) and theories about motherhood.
I liked this most when the author stuck close to her own sensory and emotional life; overall, the book felt too long and I thought a late segue into an argument against the dairy industry was unnecessary. Had I been the editor, I would have cut the titled essays and just stuck to the time-stamped pieces. At its best, though, this is a poetic engagement with the tropes and reality of motherhood, sometimes delivered in paragraphs that more closely resemble verse:
+1 I have become the common myth. Mother. The sleepy hum of early memories. The smell of shampoo, of Olay, of lavender. The feeling of safety. The absence of fear.
+2 There’s a possibility,
that we are among the happiest
people in the world:
mothers.[Record freeze preserve.] Fighting death by reproducing our days. Fighting death by reproducing. Here: your life on paper. Here: their life to come.
We’re expected to be mothers the instant we lock eyes with our baby. To shed everything we were and be reborn: Madonnas.
The baby’s favourite thing to do is sit on my lap and interact with other people. This is what mothers are for, I think. Comfort, security, a place to get to know the world from.
The language is gorgeous, and while Kinsella complains of disorientation to the point of worrying about losing herself (although she had struggled with mental health earlier in life, the subtitle’s reference to ‘madness’ seemed to me like overkill compared to other memoirs I’ve read of postpartum depression, trauma or psychosis, such as Inferno by Catherine Cho and Birth Notes by Jessica Cornwell), she comes across as entirely lucid. Her goal here is to find and add to the missing literature of motherhood, in much the same way that Jazmina Barrera, another young mother and writer, attempted with Linea Nigra. This would also make a good companion read to A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.
Kinsella is among my predictions for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award shortlist, along with Eliza Clark (Penance) and Tom Crewe (The New Life). (Public library)
The Unfamiliar: A Queer Motherhood Memoir by Kirsty Logan
I’ve read one of Kirsty Logan’s novels and dipped into her short stories. I immediately knew her parenting memoir would be up my street, but wondered how her fantasy/horror style might translate into nonfiction. Second-person narration is perfect for describing her journey into motherhood: a way of capturing the bewildering weirdness of this time but also forcing the reader to experience it firsthand. It is, in a way, as feminist and surreal as her other work. “You and your partner want a baby. But your two bodies can’t make a baby together. So you need some sperm.” That opening paragraph is a jolt, and the frank present-tense storytelling carries all through.
To start with, Logan’s wife Annie tried getting pregnant. They had a known sperm donor and did home insemination, then advanced to IVF. But after three miscarriages and a failed cycle, they took a doctor’s advice and switched to the younger womb – Logan’s, by four years. As “The Planning” makes way for “The Growing,” it helps that Annie knows exactly what she’s going through. The pregnancy sticks, though the fear of something going wrong never abates, and after the alternating magic and discomfort of those nine months (“You’ve reached the ‘shoplifting a honeydew’ stage”) it’s time for “The Birth,” as horrific an account as I’ve read. The baby had shifted to be back-to-back, which required an emergency C-section, but before that there was a sense of total helplessness, abandonment to unmanaged pain.
Finally the doctor comes. She asks what you would like, and you, shaking shitting pissing bleeding, unable to see when the pain reaches its peak, not screaming, not swearing, not being rude to anyone, not begging for an epidural, … say: I’d like to try some gas and air, if that’s okay, please.
What is remarkable is how Logan recreates this time so intensely – she took notes all through the pregnancy, plus on her phone in hospital and in the early days after bringing the baby home – but can also see how, even in the first hours, she was shaping it into a narrative. “You like that it’s a story. You like that it’s Gothic and gory … and funny.” Except it wasn’t. “You thought you were going to die.” And yet. “How can the lucid, everyday world explain this? The wonder, the curiosity, the recognition. The baby has lived inside your body, and you’ve only just met. The baby is your familiar, and deeply unfamiliar.”
This reminded me of other memoirs I’ve read about queer family-making, especially small by Claire Lynch, which similarly turns on the decision about which female partner will carry the pregnancy and is written in an experimental style. The Unfamiliar is utterly absorbing and conveys so much about the author and her family, even weaving in her father’s death seven years before. I’ve signed up for Logan’s online memoir-writing course (“Where to Start and Where to End”) organised by Writers & Artists (part of Bloomsbury) for next month.
With thanks to Virago Press for the free copy for review.
And, as a bonus, a short novel that deals with many of these same themes:
Reproduction by Louisa Hall
Procreation. Duplication. Imitation. All three connotations are appropriate for the title of an allusive novel about motherhood and doppelgangers. A pregnant writer starts composing a novel about Mary Shelley and finds the borders between fiction and (auto)biography blurring: “parts of her story detached themselves from the page and clung to my life.” The first long chapter, “Conception,” is full of biographical information about Shelley and the writing and plot of Frankenstein, chiming with Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout, which I read last year. It’s a recognisable piece of autofiction, moving with Hall from Texas to New York to Montana to Iowa as she marries, takes on various university teaching roles and goes through two miscarriages and then, in the “Birth” section, the traumatic birth of her daughter, after which she required surgery and blood transfusions.
These first two sections are exceptional. There’s a sublime clarity to them, like life has been transcribed to the page exactly as it was lived. The change of gears to the third section, “Science Fiction,” put me off, and it took me a long time to get back into the flow. In this final part, the narrator reconnects with a friend and colleague, Anna, who is determined to get pregnant on her own and genetically engineer her embryos to minimise all risk. Here she is more like a Rachel Cusk protagonist, eclipsed by another’s story and serving primarily as a recorder. I found this tedious. It all takes place during Trump’s presidency [Laura F. told me I accidentally published with that saying pregnancy – my brain was definitely saturated with the topic after these reads!] and the Covid pandemic, heightening the strangeness of matrescence and of the lengths Anna goes to. “What, after all, in these end times we lived in, was still really ‘natural’ at all?” the narrator ponders. She casts herself as the narrating Walton, and Anna as Dr. Frankenstein (or sometimes his monster), in this tale of transformation – chosen or not – and peril in a country hurtling toward self-implosion. It’s brilliantly envisioned, and – almost – flawlessly executed. (Public library)
Additional related reading:
Notes Made while Falling by Jenn Ashworth
After the Storm by Emma Jane Unsworth
And coming out in 2025: Mother, Animal by Helen Jukes (Elliott & Thompson)
December Releases: Rebecca, Not Becky & You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis
The last month of the year is generally thin on the ground for new books, but here are two December U.S. releases I reviewed early for Shelf Awareness. One is a fun and timely novel about race relations and the other an autobiographical poetry collection about asexuality and chronic illness. Below are excerpts with a link to the full text for one. Both: 
Rebecca, Not Becky by Christine Platt and Catherine Wigginton Greene
Two women navigate the nuances of racism in their affluent Northern Virginia community. Rebecca Myland shed the nickname “Becky” when it became cultural shorthand for clueless white ladies. She desperately wants to do the right thing, including making the perfect home for her husband and daughters and being a model white ally, leading the school’s diversity committee and antiracist book club.
De’Andrea Whitman reluctantly gave up her law career and Atlanta support system to move to Rolling Hills. It’s the best place for the family, given her husband Malik’s new job and the proximity to his mother’s top-notch dementia care facility. However, she is painfully aware that their daughter, Nina, may be the only Black student at the private school. De’Andrea’s therapist, Dr. Jones, challenges her to try to make one white friend.
The two protagonists have more in common than they realize. When the diversity committee’s controversial pet project of getting a statue of a Confederate general removed from the local park makes national news, the resulting ruckus threatens their fragile friendship. It’s a hugely enjoyable novel reminiscent of Terry McMillan and Curtis Sittenfeld that nonetheless takes a hard look at prejudice and performative allyship.
(And I love the title because my mother and one aunt always tried to call me Becky, but I hate that nickname!)
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis by Kelly Weber
The poet feels marked by “failure to want” and by recurring medical complaints—severe Crohn’s disease and menorrhagia, initially dismissed by a doctor as menstrual cramps. In “Blood Firsts,” she compares her first period with the later coming-of-age moment of realizing she was asexual. She describes herself as a teenage wallflower, aware of a same-sex pull but unsure what, if anything, to do about it. The series of lyrical attempted definitions in “Queerplatonic” show her in love with a female friend. Anatomy and nature supply the book’s interlocking metaphors. Animals appear frequently, but often as roadkill or taxidermied trophies. The structure varies, with prose paragraphs, columns, and text moving up the page. The rich stylistic palette (rhetorical questions, footnotes, second person, a call-and-response format) and sonic arsenal (alliteration, wordplay, anaphora) make for a courageous, unforgettable collection. (Forthcoming)
Preposterous #NovNov23 Catch-Up Post
I have a big pile of novellas I read last month but never wrote about, plus a few more I’ve sneaked in by finishing them over the past couple of days. I tweaked my shoulder last weekend and the discomfort has moved into my neck, making daily life, and sleep, difficult. A taste of what it’s like to live with chronic pain, I suppose. Add in the freezing temperatures of recent days and I’ve been feeling pretty sorry for myself and haven’t succeeded in sitting at a computer for the time required to write at least a bit about these short books. But as today is the day our link-up finishes, I’m tucked up in bed with laptop, electric blanket, heater, cat, cup of tea and ice pack, ready to do all 16 the best justice I can through a paragraph each.
Fiction:
In the Sweep of the Bay by Cath Barton (2020)
Susan put this on my radar and I bought it in publisher Louise Walters Books’ closing-down sale. Set in Morecambe, this bittersweet story of a half-century marriage and the figures on its margins – co-workers, children, even strangers – is both ambitious and intimate. Ted and Rene Marshall marry in the 1950s and soon drift into drudgery and traditional gender roles; “They forgot the happiness. Or rather, they pushed it away.” While Ted becomes a celebrated ceramics designer in the family company, Rene stagnates at home. It is not so much suspected infidelity as simply taking each other for granted that threatens their relationship. Barton moves through the decades and varies the perspective, letting us hear from one of the Marshalls’ daughters and giving kind attention to a gay couple. Strictly Come Dancing fans and those familiar with the northwest might take particular pleasure, but I enjoyed this quiet book reminiscent of Anne Tyler’s French Braid and (though less political) Jonathan Coe’s Bournville. (New purchase) [104 pages]
The Visitor by Maeve Brennan (2000)
This posthumous novella was written in the 1940s but never published in Brennan’s lifetime. From Dublin, she was a longtime New Yorker staff member and wrote acclaimed short stories. After her mother’s death, Anastasia King travels from Paris, where the two set up residence after leaving her father, to Ireland to stay in the family home with her grandmother. Anastasia considers it a return, a homecoming, but her spiteful grandmother makes it clear that she is an unwelcome interloper. Mrs King can’t forgive the wrong done to her son, and so won’t countenance Anastasia’s plan to repatriate her mother’s remains. Rejection and despair eat away at Anastasia’s mental health (“She saw the miserable gate of her defeat already open ahead. There only remained for her to come up to it and pass through it and be done with it”) but she pulls herself together for an act of defiance. Most affecting for me was a scene in which we learn that Anastasia is so absorbed in her own drama that she does not fulfill the simple last wish of a dying friend. This brought to mind James Joyce’s The Dead. (Secondhand purchase – The Bookshop, Wigtown) [81 pages] 
Bear by Marian Engel (1976)
If you’ve heard of this, it’ll be for the fact that the main character – Lou, a librarian sent to archive the holdings of an octagonal house on an island one summer – has sex with a bear. That makes it sound much more repulsive and/or titillating than it actually is. The further I read the more I started to think of it as an allegory for women’s awakening; perhaps the strategy inspired Melissa Broder’s The Pisces (stuffed full of sex with a merman). “I have an odd sense of being reborn,” Lou writes to her boss, the Institute director, with whom she’d been having an affair. The bear lives in an outbuilding and at first Lou is indifferent, only feeding him as necessary. Then he becomes a friend, joining her for swims. Then he comes into the house. Bestiality is a taboo for a reason, but what mostly bothers me is the lack of mutuality, the sense of taking advantage. I’m also wary of stories in which animals have a primarily instrumental or metaphorical role. Still, this was a solid read, offbeat and nearly as shocking today as when it first appeared. (Secondhand purchase online) [167 pages]
So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan (2023)
Several of us reviewed this for #NovNov though unsure it counts: in the UK the title story (originally for the New Yorker) was published in a standalone volume by Faber, while the U.S. release includes two additional earlier stories; I read the latter. The title story has Cathal spending what should have been his wedding weekend moping about Sabine calling off their engagement at the last minute. It’s no mystery why she did: his misogyny, though not overt, runs deep, most evident in the terms in which he thinks about women. And where did he learn it? From his father. (“The Long and Painful Death” is from Keegan’s second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, and concerns a woman on a writing residency at an author’s historic house in Ireland. She makes a stand for her own work by refusing to cede place to an entitled male scholar. The final story is “Antarctica,” the lead story in that 1999 volume and a really terrific one I’d already experienced before. It’s as dark and surprising as an early Ian McEwan novel.) Keegan proves, as ever, to be a master at portraying emotions and relationships, but the one story is admittedly slight on its own, and its point obvious. (Read via Edelweiss) [64 pages]
Swallowing Geography by Deborah Levy (1993)
“She is Europe’s eerie child, and she is part of the storm.” J.K. is a young woman who totes her typewriter around different European locations, sleeps with various boyfriends, hears strangers’ stories, and so on. Many of the people she meets are only designated by an initial. By contrast, the most fully realized character is her mother, Lillian Strauss. The chapters feel unconnected and the encounters within them random, building to nothing. Though a bit like Crudo, this has very little detail to latch onto and so was pretentious in its opacity. I’ve generally gotten on much better with Levy’s nonfiction (see below) than her fiction. This, along with the Keegan (above), was my chosen train entertainment for the Booker Prize evening. I got so little out of it that it seemed like wasted reading time. Here’s a decent excerpted passage: “The arrogance of metaphor when facts save people’s lives. The succour of metaphor when facts inadequately describe people’s lives.” (Public library) [83 pages] 
Nonfiction:
Starting with two from the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series, a great source of short monographs. These have been among my favourites so far.
Grave by Allison C. Meier (2023)
Meier is a cemetery tour guide in Brooklyn, where she lives. She surveys American burial customs in particular, noting the lack of respect for Black and Native American burial grounds, the Civil War-era history of embalming, the increasing popularity of cremation, and the rise of garden cemeteries such as Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which can serve as wildlife havens. The mass casualties and fear of infection associated with Covid-19 brought back memories of the AIDS epidemic, especially for those in New York City. Meier travels to a wide range of resting places, from potter’s fields for unclaimed bodies to the most manicured cemeteries. She also talks about newer options such as green burial, body composting, and the many memorial objects ashes can be turned into. I’m a dedicated reader of books about death and so found this fascinating, with the perfect respectful and just-shy-of-melancholy tone. It’s political and philosophical in equal measures. (Read via NetGalley) [168 pages] 
Pregnancy Test by Karen Weingarten (2023)
Laboratory pregnancy tests have been available since the 1930s and home pregnancy tests – the focus here – since the 1970s. All of them work by testing urine for the hormone hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin). What is truly wild is that pregnancy used to be verifiable only with laboratory animals – female mice and rabbits had to be sacrificed to see if their ovaries had swelled after the injection of a woman’s urine; later, female Xenopus toads were found to lay eggs in response, so didn’t need to be killed. Home pregnancy kits were controversial and available in Canada before the USA because it was thought that they could be unreliable or that they would encourage early abortions. Weingarten brings together the history, laypeople-friendly science, and cultural representations (taking a pregnancy test is excellent TV shorthand) in a readable narrative and makes a clear feminist statement: “the home pregnancy test gave back to women what should have always been theirs: first-hand knowledge about how their bodies worked” and thus “had the potential to upend a paternalistic culture.” (Read via NetGalley) [160 pages]
And from a different Bloomsbury series for monographs about seminal albums, 33 1/3:
Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson (2019)
The dc Talk album Jesus Freak (1995) is the first CD I ever owned. My best friend and I listened to it (along with Bloom by Audio Adrenaline and Take Me to Your Leader by Newsboys) so many times that we knew every word and note by heart. So it’s hard for me to be objective rather than nostalgic; I was intrigued to see what two secular academics would have to say. Crucially, they were teenage dc Talk fans, now ex-Evangelicals and homosexual partners. As English professors, their approach is to spot musical influences (Nirvana on the title track; R&B and gospel elsewhere), critically analyse lyrics (with “Colored People” proving problematic for its “neoliberal multiculturalism and its potential for post-racial utopianism”), and put a queer spin on things. For those who don’t know, dc Talk were essentially a boy band with three singers, one Black and two white – one of these a rapper. Stockton and Gilson chronicle the confusion of living with a same-sex attraction they couldn’t express as teens, and cheekily suggest there may have been something going on between dc Talk members Toby McKeehan and Michael Tait, who were roommates at Liberty University and apparently dismantled their bunk beds so they could sleep side by side. Hmmm! I was interested enough in the subject matter to overlook the humanities jargon. (Birthday gift from my wish list last year) [132 pages] 
And the rest:
Fifty Days of Solitude by Doris Grumbach (1994)
Grumbach died last year at age 104. This was my third of her books; I read two previous memoirs, Extra Innings and The Presence of Absence, when they were brought back into print as Open Road Media e-books. I knew of Grumbach through her association with May Sarton, and the two in fact had a lot in common, including lesbianism, living in Maine and writing about older age. I was expecting something on a par with Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, one of my favourite books, but this fell short in comparison. Grumbach spent a month and a half alone in Maine during the winter of 1993 while her partner, Sybil, was away amassing stock for their bookstore. The book is a collection of unconnected meditations about nature, the cold, creativity and so on. She finds herself writing fiction so the characters can keep her company, and notes “how much more I was aware of my vices.” Although she tries to avoid the news, word reaches her of acquaintances’ demises, and she recalls the recent death from AIDS of a young local man. Amusingly, she rereads Bear (see above) during the 50 days. Some atmosphere, but low on insight. (Secondhand purchase – Wonder Book and Video, Hagerstown) [114 pages]
Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing by Deborah Levy (2013)
It feels like I made an error by reading Levy’s “Living Autobiography,” out of order. I picked up the middle volume of the trilogy, The Cost of Living, for #NovNov in 2021 and it ended up being my favourite nonfiction read of that year. I then read part of the third book, Real Estate, last year but set it aside. And now I’ve read the first because it was the shortest. It’s loosely structured around George Orwell’s four reasons for writing: political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism and aesthetic enthusiasm. The frame story has her flying to Majorca at a time when she was struggling with her mental health. She vaguely follows in the footsteps of George Sand and then pauses to tell a Chinese shopkeeper the story of her upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa and the family’s move to London. Although I generally admire recreations of childhood and there are some strong pen portraits of minor characters, overall there was little that captivated me here and I was too aware of the writerly shaping. (Secondhand purchase – 2nd & Charles, Hagerstown) [111 pages]
The Private Life of the Hare by John Lewis-Stempel (2019)
I reviewed a couple of JLS’s species-specific monographs for #NovNov in 2018: The Secret Life of the Owl and The Glorious Life of the Oak. There’s a similar range of material here: anatomy, natural history and cultural significance, including in poetry. There are chapters on hunting, the hare as food, and its appearances in myth and religion. I was engaged about half of the time; I tended to skip over longer excerpts from historical documents. The reliance on lengthy quotations and use of bullet points make it feel like a half-finished research project, with the kind of information you could find anywhere else. Too many of his recent books have felt like they were rushed into print. I would only pick this up if you’re particularly fascinated by hares. (Public library) [99 pages]
The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde (1980)
I’ve read so many cancer stories that it takes a lot to make one stand out. This feels like a random collection of documents rather than a coherent memoir. One of the three essays was originally a speech, and two were previously printed in another of her books. Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and had a mastectomy. A Black lesbian feminist, she resisted wearing prostheses and spoke up about the potential environmental causes of breast cancer that need to be addressed in research (“I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2”). Her actual journal entries make up little of the text, which is for the best because fear and pain can bring out the cliches in us – but occasionally a great quote like “if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.” Another favourite line: “Pain does not mellow you, nor does it ennoble, in my experience.” I’m keen to read her memoir Zami. (University library) [77 pages]
A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar (2019)
I’d not read Matar before I spotted this art book-cum-memoir and thought, why not. A Libyan American novelist who lives in London, Matar had long been fascinated by the Sienese School of painting (13th to 15th centuries), many of whose artists depicted biblical scenes or religious allegories – even though he’s not a Christian. He spent a month in Italy immersed in the art he loves; there are 15 colour reproductions here. His explications of art history are generalist enough to be accessible to all readers, but I engaged more with the glimpses into his own life. For instance, he meets a fellow Arabic speaker and they quickly form a brotherly attachment, and a Paradise scene gives him fanciful hope of being reunited with his missing father – the subject of his Folio Prize-winning memoir The Return, which I’d like to read soon. His prose is beautiful as he reflects on history, death and how memories occupy ‘rooms’ in the imagination. A little more interest in the art would have helped, though. (Little Free Library) [118 pages] 
A Childhood in Scotland by Christian Miller (1981)
I had high hopes for this childhood memoir that originally appeared in the New Yorker and was reprinted as part of the Canongate Classics series. But I soon resorted to skimming as her recollections of her shabby upper-class upbringing in a Highlands castle are full of page after page of description and dull recounting of events, with few scenes and little dialogue. This would be of high historical value for someone wanting to understand daily life for a certain fraction of society at the time, however. When Miller’s father died, she was only 10 and they had to leave the castle. I was intrigued to learn from her bio that she lived in Newbury for a time. (Secondhand purchase – Barter Books) [98 pages]
Here and Now: Living in the Spirit by Henri J.M. Nouwen (1994)
This collection of micro-essays under themed headings like “Living in the Present” and “Suffering” was a perfect introduction to Nouwen’s life and theology. The Dutch Catholic priest lived in an Ontario community serving the physically and mentally disabled, and died of a heart attack just two years after this was published. I marked out many reassuring or thought-provoking passages. Here’s a good pre-Christmas one:
“God became a little child in the midst of a violent world. Are we surprised by joy or do we keep saying: ‘How nice and sweet, but the reality is different.’ What if the child reveals to us what is really real?”
I was taken by the ideas that the life of compassion is one of “downward mobility” and that inner freedom only comes when you don’t judge anyone. He encourages readers to not live in a past of shame and regret, but to be grateful for opportunities for God’s mercy and guidance. Very peaceful and readable; a good bedside devotional book. (Free from my stepfather) [175 pages] 
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1897)
My only reread for the month. Wilde wrote this from prison. No doubt he had a miserable time there, but keeping in mind that he was a flamboyant dramatist and had an eye to this being published someday, this time around I found it more exaggerated and self-pitying than I had before. “Suffering is one very long moment. … Where there is sorrow there is holy ground,” he writes, stating that he has found “harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world.” He says he’s not going to try to defend his behaviour … but what is this but one extended apologia and humble brag, likening himself to a Greek tragic hero (“The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion”) and even to Christ in his individuality as well as in his suffering at the hands of those who don’t understand him (the scene where he was pilloried consciously mimics a crucifixion tableau). As a literary document, it’s extraordinary, but I didn’t buy his sincerity. He feigns remorse but, really, wasn’t sorry about anything, merely sorry he got caught. (Free from a neighbour) [151 pages]
Original rating (2011):
Rating now:
Average:
Which of these have you read?
And which do you want to read? (You may choose no more than 4!)
In total, I read 27 novellas this November – close to my 2021 record of 29. The highlights included the Barton, Meier, Nouwen and Weingarten above plus Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, but the best of the lot was Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain.
Coming right up, final statistics on the month’s participants and posts!
Review Catch-Up: Monica, Bibliomaniac, Family Meal, Fudge & More
I’m catching up with reviews of the many October releases I read, including these four sent by publishers…
- a genre-bending, Technicolor graphic novel in the form of short comics
- a book-addict’s memoir of an ambitious Covid-times tour of Britain’s bookshops
- an understated novel about queer men of colour coping with death and mental illness
- and a quirky contemporary poetry collection I read in one sitting.
Followed by a bonus list of October books I reviewed for Shelf Awareness, similarly varied in genre: autofiction, flash fiction, horror-tinged historical fiction, graphic memoirs and more.
Monica by Daniel Clowes
Daniel Clowes is a respected American graphic novelist best known for Ghost World, which was adapted into a 2001 film starring Scarlett Johansson. I’m not sure what I was expecting of Monica. Perhaps something closer to a quiet life story like Alison by Lizzy Stewart? In any case, not this jumble of 1970s nostalgia and supernatural horror. The book is in nine loosely connected stories that make the head spin with their genre and tonal shifts; one thing that stays constant is Clowes’s drawing style, which combines vibrant, campy colour with exaggerated faces and blunt haircuts.
At first it seems there will be a straightforward linear narrative: the prologue, “Foxhole,” has two soldiers dreaming of what life will be like Vietnam, with the one looking forward to a simple life with his fiancée Penny. “Pretty Penny” shatters those illusions as we see that Penny has fully embraced sexual liberation while he’s been away. She rejects her mother and, in a countercultural decision, keeps the baby when she gets pregnant. Young Monica has a sequence of stepfather figures before Penny dumps her with her parents and goes AWOL.
To an extent, the rest of the book is about Monica’s search for her parents. We see her as a young college student communicating with her dead grandfather via a radio, as a successful entrepreneur selling candles, and as an older woman caretaking for a California Airbnb. But in between there are bizarre sci-fi/folk horror interludes – “The Glow Infernal” and “The Incident” – about unconnected characters, and Monica’s involvement with a cult inevitably turns strange. I couldn’t get past the distasteful story lines or grotesque style. Mostly, I wasn’t convinced that Clowes liked or cared about any of his own characters, so why should I? (This might be Tom Cox’s dream book, but not mine.) I suppose I might try a classic work by Clowes one day, but only if I can be assured that it has more plot and heart.
With thanks to Jonathan Cape (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive’s Tour of the Bookshops of Britain by Robin Ince
Do you know anyone who can buy just one book? Do you know anyone who leaves a bookshop only with what they walked in to buy?
I understand that Robin Ince is a radio personality and comedian who, though holding no formal qualifications, often delivers presentations about science. He was meant to undertake a stadium tour with Professor Brian Cox in the autumn of 2021, but a Covid resurgence put paid to that. Not one for sitting around at home – he comes across as driven, antsy; positively allergic to boredom – he formulated Plan B: 100+ events, most of them in independent bookshops (the oddest venue was a Chinese restaurant; he was speaking to the Plymouth Humanists), over the course of two months, criss-crossing Britain and hitting many favourite places such as Hay-on-Wye, Hungerford (my local indie) and Wigtown. The topic of his previous book was curiosity, which gave him free rein to feature anything that interested him, so no two talks were the same and he incorporated lots of ad hoc book recommendations.
Ince is not just a speaker at the bookshops but, invariably, a customer – as well as at just about every charity shop in a town. Even when he knows he’ll be carrying his purchases home in his luggage on the train, he can’t resist a browse. And while his shopping basket would look wildly different to mine (his go-to sections are science and philosophy, the occult, 1960s pop and alternative culture; alongside a wide but utterly unpredictable range of classic and contemporary fiction and antiquarian finds), I sensed a kindred spirit in so many lines:
“A bookshop with a proximity to an interesting graveyard is a fine combination.”
“I like charity bookshops, because I can delude myself into believing that I am committing an altruistic act by purchasing too many books. I am not satisfying my consumer lust – I am digging a well in Uganda.”
“This is one of the wonders of books: the delight of being a species that can chronicle and preserve. I pick up a book from a shelf, and someone who is no more than ash or bone can still change me.”
He’s also refreshingly open-minded, determined not to become a white male dinosaur: he once spent a wonderful year reading only women authors, and gratefully accepts the gift of a Black queer feminist work – at which he knows a younger version of himself would have scoffed. I took lots of notes on shops I hadn’t heard of, but also appreciated the witty asides on British ways and on the rigours and coincidences of the tour. If you liked White Spines, this will be right up your street, though to me this was universal where the Royle was too niche. And it didn’t matter a jot that I was previously unfamiliar with Ince as a public figure.
Bibliomaniac came out in paperback on 5 October. My thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Family Meal by Bryan Washington
After the verve of his linked short stories (Lot, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize) and the offbeat tenderness of his debut novel, Memorial, I couldn’t wait for Bryan Washington’s next book. While it’s set in the multicultural Houston of his first book and similarly peopled by young queer men of colour, Family Meal shares the more melancholy edge of Memorial with its focus on bereavement and the habits and relationships that help the characters to cope.
Cam has moved back to Houston from Los Angeles after the untimely death of his boyfriend Kai, who had a budding career as a translator and spent part of each year in Japan. Cam works in a failing gay bar, crashes with his boss and has mostly stopped eating. Although he still loves cooking Asian food for others, he rarely tastes it himself; his overpowering appetite now is for pills and sex, leading him to arrange as many as four hook-ups per day. Kai still appears and communicates to him. “Easier to spend time dwelling on death than it is to live, says Kai.” Is it to escape this spectre, or the memory of what happened to Kai, that Cam descends into his addictions? Meanwhile, his estranged friend TJ, with whom Cam grew up at TJ’s Korean American family’s bakery after the death of Cam’s parents, has his own history of loss and unhealthy relationships. But a connection with the bakery’s new nonbinary employee, Noel, seems like it might be different.
If you’ve read Washington before, you’ll know what to expect: no speech marks, obscenity-strewn dialogue, sexually explicit scenes that seem to be there for the sake of it (because sex is part of life, rather than because they particularly advance the plot). An issue I had here, like with Memorial, is that having multiple first-person narrators doesn’t add anything; Kai and TJ sound so much like Cam, who narrates roughly the first half, that it’s hard to tell their affectless accounts apart. Such interchangeable voices two books running suggests to me that Washington hasn’t yet managed to fully imagine himself outside of his own personality.
The novel has much to convey about found family, food as nurture, and how we try to fill the emptiness in our lives with things that aren’t good for us. However, it often delivers these messages through what wise secondary characters say, which struck me as unsubtle.
“You don’t have to do this alone, says TJ.”
(Kai:) “My mother would say, Cooking is care. The act is the care.”
“Love can be a lot of things though, says Noel. Right? It’s pleasure but it’s also washing the dishes and sorting medication and folding the laundry. It’s picking out what to eat for dinner three nights in a row, even if you don’t want to. And it’s knowing when to speak up, and when to stay quiet, and when, I think, to move on. But also when to fight for it.”
“Sometimes the best we can do is live for each other, she [Kai’s sister] says. It’s enough. Even if it seems like it isn’t.”
There’s no doubting how heartfelt this story is. It brought tears to my eyes at the beginning and end, but in between did not captivate me as much as I hoped. While intermittently poignant on the subject of bereavement, it is so mired in the characters’ unhealthy coping mechanisms that it becomes painful to read.
In my mind Washington and Brandon Taylor are in the same basket, though that may be reductive or unimaginative of me (young, gay Black authors from the American South who have published three books and tend to return to the same themes and settings). Before this year I would have said Taylor had the edge, but The Late Americans was so disappointingly similar to his previous work that Washington has taken the lead. I just hope that with his next work he challenges himself instead of coasting along in the groove he’s created thus far.
I wish I could get a copy of this into the hands of Sufjan Stevens…
With thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Fudge by Andrew Weatherhead
I read this over a chilled-out coffee at the Globe bar in Hay-on-Wye (how perfect, then, to come across the lines “I know the secret of life / Is to read good books”). Weatherhead mostly charts the rhythms of everyday existence in pandemic-era New York City, especially through a haiku sequence (“The blind cat asleep / On my lap—and coffee / Just out of reach” – a situation familiar to any cat owner). His style is matter-of-fact and casually funny, juxtaposing random observations about hipster-ish experiences. From “Things the Photoshop Instructor Said and Did”: “Someone gasped when he increased the contrast / I feel like everyone here is named Taylor.”
The central piece, “Poem While on Hold with NBA League Pass Customer Support Nov. 17, 2018,” descends into the absurd, but his four hours lost on the phone are reclaimed through his musings on a sport he once played (“I had begun to find meaning in art and music / I was always too cerebral a player anyways … That feeling—of perfect grace and equanimity— / must be what we’re all searching for in this life”) and on life in general. This is poetry that doesn’t feel like poetry, if that makes sense. I have a hunch that it might appeal to readers of David Foster Wallace.
Published by Publishing Genius. With thanks to publicist Lori Hettler for the e-copy for review.
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
(Links to full text)
The Flowers of Provence by Jamie Beck (Gift books feature): A gorgeous book of photographs, perfect for gardeners, romantics, and armchair travelers. Her still lifes are as detailed and colorful as medieval paintings.
Edith Holler by Edward Carey (forthcoming): A dark fairy tale about a precocious girl confined to her family’s theatre in Norwich, England yet driven to reveal the truth behind her city’s child disappearances. Reminiscent of Dahl, Dickens, and Shakespeare at their goriest.
I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast: A laugh-out-loud-funny tour through her dream journal as well as a brief introduction to dream theory. Delightfully captures the randomness of dream topics and dialogues.
Tremor by Teju Cole: A kaleidoscopic work of autofiction that journeys between the US and Nigeria as it questions the ownership and meaning of Black art. The sophisticated structure is a highlight of this elegant study of art criticism, suffering, and subjectivity.
Our Strangers by Lydia Davis (Review and Q&A): In her ninth collection of mostly flash-length stories (a whopping 143 of them), an overarching theme is the mystery of human communication and connection. A real cornucopia of genres, structures, and voices. [Only available via Bookshop.org and independent bookstores.]
Lotería by Esteban Rodríguez: Lotería is a traditional Mexican game of chance. Each Spanish-language card is allotted a one-page poem in a creative, poignant recounting of his Mexican American family history.
Glass Half Empty by Rachael Smith: The British comics artist third graphic memoir is a refreshingly candid account of her recovery from alcoholism after her father’s death. In some panes, her adult self appears alongside her younger self, offering advice.
The Dead Peasant’s Handbook by Brian Turner: The final installment – after The Wild Delight of Wild Things and The Goodbye World Poem – in an intimate, autobiographical trilogy. Love is presented as the key to surviving bereavement and wartime trauma.
Short Stories in September, Part III: Linked Collections by Jonathan Escoffery & Soraya Palmer
These two debut linked short story collections had enough in common to get a mention in yesterday’s Book Serendipity post, including a 2023 publication date, a central sibling pair, Jamaican heritage, and memories of a devastating hurricane.
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
A starred Kirkus review first put this on my radar, and I requested a copy back in February. Though I enjoyed the first two stories, I then set the book aside. Its longlisting for this year’s Booker Prize reminded me to pick it back up and it’s now one of the six on the shortlist.
Five of eight stories are filtered through the consciousness of Trelawny, the younger son of Topper and Sanya, who immigrated to Miami in the late 1970s to escape unrest in Kingston, Jamaica. Older brother Delano is the golden boy, yet in a post-recession landscape both sons struggle to get by. After their parents’ split, the family home seems like a totem of security.
An accident leads Delano to give up his tree service business and pursue reggae music professionally. Trees play a pivotal role: when Topper humiliates him at a party by calling him “soft” and “defective,” Trelawny attacks his father’s beloved ackee tree with an axe. After Topper kicks him out, Trelawny lives in his car, accepting a succession of strange and sordid gigs (the stuff of “Odd Jobs” and the title story; “in Miami … you’re as likely to wind up getting your organs harvested as you are to make a profit”) before settling on teaching.
Three stories are in the always engaging second person (one of those inhabiting Topper’s perspective), three are narrated in the first person by Trelawny, and two are in the third person – the one about Delano and another about their cousin Cukie (“Splashdown”). Family legacy, particularly from fathers, is a major theme. “I felt sick with hatred,” Trelawny says. “For her [racist] father, yes, but for all fathers, for their propensity for passing down the worst of themselves.”
Trelawny is an entertaining POV character, jaded but quick-witted as he navigates microaggressions. People are confused about whether he’s African American or Latino. “In Flux,” the opening story and probably the strongest, has him coming to terms with what it means to be Black in America while living in Florida or at college in the Midwest, prompted by a question he frequently has to field: “What are you?” My other favourite story was “Independent Living,” in which he’s an administrator for an oversubscribed senior housing block and has to become as wily as his residents.
Escoffery creates a strong sense of place and character. I suspect there’s a lot that’s autobiographical here, as is common in first books. His ambivalence about sites that hold personal significance is palpable. Ideally, a linked collection will be composed of confident stand-alone stories that together are more than the sum of their parts. I didn’t really feel that about these. While the voice is promising and several stories are highlights, the whole didn’t set me on fire. (And I’d be astonished if it won the Booker. That’ll go to a guy named Paul.) Maybe Escoffery has a great novel brewing, though.
A favourite passage:
“On the day you are scheduled to begin the sixth grade, a hurricane named Andrew pops your house’s roof open, peeling it back like the lid of a Campbell’s soup can, pouring a fraction of the Atlantic into your bedroom, living room—everywhere—bloating carpet, drywall, and fibreboard with sopping sea salt corrosion. It disinters the kidney-colored fibreglass from the walls and ceiling, splaying the house’s entrails on the lawn. The storm chops your neighbor’s house to rubble, parks a tugboat at the far end of your street.”
With thanks to 4th Estate for the free copy for review.
Buy from Bookshop [affiliate link].
The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer
Sasha and Zora are steeped in Caribbean folklore absorbed from their parents. Nigel, from Jamaica, tells them about “Rolling Calf,” the vengeful ghost of a butcher paying penance for all the animals he slaughtered; Trinidadian Beatrice reminds them that the hero of the Anansi stories is a woman. Like the trickster spider, these Brooklyn adolescents will have to live by their wits when their family disintegrates – Nigel leaves to marry a German woman and Beatrice returns to Trinidad when she’s diagnosed with metastatic skin cancer.
Apart from a few third-person segments about the parents, the chapters, set between 1997 and 2005, trade off first-person narration duties between Zora, a romantic would-be writer, and Sasha, the black sheep and substitute family storyteller-in-chief, who dates women and goes by Ashes when she starts wearing a binder. It’s interesting to discover examples of queer erasure in both parents’ past, connecting Beatrice more tightly to Sasha than it first appears – people always condemn most vehemently what they’re afraid of revealing in themselves.
I’ve had too much of the patois + legends/magic realism combo recently (e.g., When We Were Birds) and Palmer tries too hard to root her stories in time through 1990s pop culture references. She also exhibits a slightly annoying MFA stylistic showiness, whereas Escoffery’s work feels more natural. Still, this is more novel than stories (the opposite is true for If I Survive You) and thus the kind of book that would make a good wildcard selection on the Women’s Prize longlist. (Passed along by a book club friend) 
A favourite passage:
Zora: “It was like the end of a Jenga game, the way shit just fell apart. Our family foundation had been fading slowly for years, and yet when it all collapsed, it seemed to happen all at once.”
Buy from Bookshop [affiliate link].
Final reviews and a roundup coming up soon.
Currently reading: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro; Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, ed. Christine Park; Small, Burning Things by Cathy Ulrich
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 