Three on a Theme of Sylvia Plath (The Slicks by Maggie Nelson for #NonfictionNovember & #NovNov25; The Bell Jar and Ariel)
A review copy of Maggie Nelson’s brand-new biographical essay on Sylvia Plath (and Taylor Swift) was the excuse I needed to finally finish a long-neglected paperback of The Bell Jar and also get a taste of Plath’s poetry through the posthumous collection Ariel, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary. These are the sorts of works it’s hard to believe ever didn’t exist; they feel so fully formed and part of the zeitgeist. It also boggles the mind how much Plath accomplished before her death by suicide at age 30. What I previously knew of her life mostly came from hearsay and was reinforced by Euphoria by Elin Cullhed. For the mixture of nonfiction, fiction and poetry represented below, I’m counting this towards Nonfiction November’s Book Pairings week.
The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift by Maggie Nelson (2025)
Can young women embrace fame amidst the other cultural expectations of them? Nelson attempts to answer this question by comparing two figures who turn(ed) life into art. The link between them was strengthened by Swift titling her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department. “Plath … serves as a metonym – as does Swift – for a woman who makes art about a broken heart,” Nelson writes. “When women make the personal public, the charge of whorishness always lurks nearby.” What women are allowed to say and do has always, it seems, attracted public commentary, and “anyone who puts their work into the world, at any level, must learn to navigate between self-protectiveness and risk, becoming harder and staying soft.”
Nelson acknowledges a major tonal difference between Plath and Swift, however. Plath longed for fame but didn’t get the chance to enjoy it; she’s the patron saint of sad-girl poetry and makes frequent reference to death, whereas Swift spotlights joy and female empowerment. It’s a shame this was out of date before it went to print; my advanced copy, at least, isn’t able to comment on Swift’s engagement and the baby rumour mill sure to follow. It would be illuminating to have an afterword in which Nelson discusses the effect of spouses’ competing fame and speculates on how motherhood might change Swift’s art.
Full confession: I’ve only ever knowingly heard one Taylor Swift song, “Anti-Hero,” on the radio in the States. (My assessment was: wordy, angsty, reasonably catchy.) Undoubtedly, I would have gotten more out of this essay were I equally familiar with the two subjects. Nonetheless, it’s fluid and well argued, and I was engaged throughout. If you’re a Swiftie as well as a literary type, you need to read this.
[66 pages]
With thanks to Vintage (Penguin) for the advanced e-copy for review.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
Given my love of mental hospital accounts and women’s autofiction, it’s a wonder I’d not read this before my forties. It was first published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas” because Plath thought it immature, “an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past.” Esther Greenwood is the stand-in for Plath: a talented college student who, after working in New York City during the remarkable summer of 1953, plunges into mental ill health. Chapter 13 is amazing and awful at the same time as Esther attempts suicide thrice in one day, toying with a silk bathrobe cord and ocean waves before taking 50 pills and walling herself into a corner of the cellar. She bounces between various institutional settings, undergoing electroshock therapy – the first time it’s horrible, but later, under a kind female doctor, it’s more like it’s ‘supposed’ to be: a calming reset.
The 19-year-old is obsessed with the notion of purity. She has a couple of boyfriends but decides to look for someone else to take her virginity. Beforehand, the asylum doctor prescribes her a fitting for a diaphragm. A defiant claim to the right to contraception despite being unmarried is a way of resisting the bell jar – the rarefied prison – of motherhood. Still, Esther feels guilty about prioritizing her work over what seems like feminine duty: “Why was I so maternal and apart? Why couldn’t I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby? … I was my own woman.” Plath never reconciled parenthood with poetry. Whether that’s the fault of Ted Hughes, or the times they lived in, who can say. For her and for Esther, the hospital is a prison as well – but not so hermetic as the turmoil of her own mind. How ironic to read “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am” knowing that this was published just a few weeks before this literary genius ceased to be.
Apart from an unfortunate portrayal of a “negro” worker at the hospital, this was an enduringly relevant and absorbing read, a classic to sit alongside Emily Holmes Coleman’s The Shutter of Snow and Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water.
(Secondhand – it’s been in my collection so long I can’t remember where it’s from, but I’d guess a Bowie Library book sale or Wonder Book & Video / Public library – I was struggling with the small type so switched to a recent paperback and found it more readable)
Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965)
Impossible not to read this looking for clues of her death to come:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
(from “Lady Lazarus”)
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
(from “Years”)
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment
(from “Edge”)
I feel incapable of saying anything fresh about this collection, which takes no prisoners. The images and vocabulary are razor-sharp. First and last lines or stanzas are particularly memorable. (“Morning Song” starts “Love set you going like a fat gold watch”; “Lady Lazarus” ends “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.”) Words and phrases repeat and gather power as they go. “The Applicant” mocks the obligations of a wife: “A living doll … / It can sew, it can cook. It can talk, talk, talk. … // … My boy, it’s your last resort. / Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.” I don’t know a lot about Plath’s family life, only that her father was a Polish immigrant and died after a long illness when she was eight, but there must have been some daddy issues there – after all, “Daddy” includes the barbs “Daddy, I have had to kill you” and “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two— / The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know.” It ends, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Several later poems in a row, including “Stings,” incorporate bee-related imagery, and Plath’s father was an international bee expert. I can see myself reading this again and again in future, and finding her other collections, too – all but one of them posthumous. (Secondhand – RSPCA charity shop, Newbury)
Three on a Theme: Armchair Travels at the Italian Coast (Rachel Joyce, Sarah Moss and Jess Walter – #18 of 20 Books)
I’ve done a lot of journeying through Italy’s lakes and islands this summer. Not in real life, thank goodness – it would be far too hot! – but via books. I started with the Moss, then read the Joyce, and rounded off with the Walter, a book that had been on my TBR for 12 years and that many had heartily recommended, so I was delighted to finally experience it for myself.
The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce (2025)
Joyce has really upped her game. I’ve somehow read all of her books though I often found them, from Harold Fry onward, disappointingly sentimental and twee. But with this she’s entering the big leagues, moving into the more expansive, elegant and empathetic territory of novels by Anne Enright (The Green Road), Patrick Gale (Notes from an Exhibition), Maggie O’Farrell (Instructions for a Heatwave) and Tom Rachman (The Italian Teacher). It’s the story of four siblings, initially drawn together and then dramatically blown apart by their father’s death. Despite weighty themes of alcoholism, depression and marital struggles, there is an overall lightness of tone and style that made this a pleasure to read.
Vic Kemp, the title figure, was a larger-than-life, womanizing painter whose work divided critics. After his first wife’s early death from cancer, he raised three daughters and a son with the help of a rotating cast of nannies (whom he inevitably slept with). At 76 he delivered the shocking news that he was marrying again: Bella-Mae, an artist in her twenties – much younger than any of his children. They moved from London to his second home in Italy just weeks before he drowned in Lake Orta. Netta, the eldest daughter, is sure there’s something fishy; he knew the lake so well and would never have gone out for a swim with a mist rolling in. Did Bella-Mae kill him for his money? And where is his last painting? Funny how waiting for an autopsy report and searching for a new will and carping with siblings over the division of belongings can ruin what should be paradise.
The interactions between Netta, Susan, Goose (Gustav) and Iris, plus Bella-Mae and her cousin Laszlo, are all flawlessly done, and through flashbacks and surges forward we learn so much about these flawed and flailing characters. The derelict villa and surrounding small town are appealing settings, and there are a lot of intriguing references to food, fashion and modern art.
My only small points of criticism are that Iris is less fleshed out than the others (and her bombshell secret felt distasteful), and that Joyce occasionally resorts to delivering some of her old obvious (though true) messages through an omniscient narrator, whereas they could be more palatable if they came out organically in dialogue or indirectly through a character’s thought process. Here’s an example: “When someone dies or disappears, we can only tell stories about what might have been the case or what might have happened next.” (One I liked better: “There were some things you never got over. No amount of thinking or talking would make them right: the best you could do was find a way to live alongside them.”) I also don’t think Goose would have been able to view his father’s body more than two months after his death; even with embalming, it would have started to decay within weeks.
You can tell that Joyce got her start in theatre because she’s so good at scenes and dialogue, and at moving people into different groups to see what they’ll do. She’s taken the best of her work in other media and brought it to bear here. It’s fascinating how Goose starts off seeming minor and eventually becomes the main POV character. And ending with a wedding (good enough for a Shakespearean comedy) offers a lovely occasion for a potential reconciliation after a (tragi)comic plot. More of this calibre, please! (Public library) 
Ripeness by Sarah Moss (2025)
One sneaky little line, “Ripeness, not readiness, is all,” a Shakespeare mash-up (“Ripeness is all” is from King Lear vs. “the readiness is all” is from Hamlet), gives a clue to how to understand this novel: As a work of maturity from Sarah Moss, presenting life with all its contradictions and disappointments, not attempting to counterbalance that realism with any false optimism. What do we do, who will we be, when faced with situations for which we aren’t prepared?
Now that she’s based in Ireland, Moss seems almost to be channelling Irish authors such as Claire Keegan and Maggie O’Farrell. The line-up of themes – ballet + sisters + ambivalent motherhood + the question of immigration and belonging – should have added up to something incredible and right up my street. While Ripeness is good, even very good, it feels slightly forced. As has been true with some of Moss’s recent fiction (especially Summerwater), there is the air of a creative writing experiment. Here the trial is to determine which feels closer, a first-person rendering of a time nearly 60 years ago, or a present-tense, close-third-person account of the now. [I had in mind advice from one of Emma Darwin’s Substack posts: “What you’ll see is that ‘deep third’ is really much the same as first, in the logic of it, just with different pronouns: you are locking the narrative into a certain character’s point-of-view, but you don’t have a sense of that character as the narrator, the way you do in first person.” Except, increasingly as the novel goes on, we are compelled to think about Edith as a narrator, of her own life and others’.
In the current story line, everyone in rural West Ireland seems to have come from somewhere else (e.g. Edith’s lover Gunter is German). “She’s going to have to find a way to rise above it, this tribalism,” Edith thinks. She’s aghast at her town playing host to a small protest against immigration. Fair enough, but including this incident just seems like an excuse for some liberal handwringing (“since it’s obvious that there is enough for all, that the problem is distribution not supply, why cannot all have enough? Partly because people like Edith have too much.”). The facts of Maman being French-Israeli and having lost family in the Holocaust felt particularly shoehorned in; referencing Jewishness adds nothing. I also wondered why she set the 1960s narrative in Italy, apart from novelty and personal familiarity. (Teenage Edith’s high school Italian is improbably advanced, allowing her to translate throughout her sister’s childbirth.)
Though much of what I’ve written seems negative, I was left with an overall favourable impression. Mostly it’s that the delivery scene and the chapters that follow it are so very moving. Plus there are astute lines everywhere you look, whether on dance, motherhood, or migration. It may simply be that Moss was taking on too much at once, such that this lacks the focus of her novellas. Ultimately, I would have been happy to have just the historical story line; the repeat of the surrendering for adoption element isn’t necessary to make any point. (I was relieved, anyway, that Moss didn’t resort to the cheap trick of having the baby turn out to be a character we’ve already been introduced to.) I admire the ambition but feel Moss has yet to return to the sweet spot of her first five novels. Still, I’m a fan for life. (Public library) 
#18 of my 20 Books of Summer
(Completing the second row on the Bingo card: Book set in a vacation destination)
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (2012)
I loved how Emma Straub described the ideal summer read in one of her Substack posts: “My plan for the summer is to read as many books as possible that make me feel that drugged-up feeling, where you just want to get back to the page.” I wish I’d been able to read this faster – that I hadn’t had so much on my plate all summer so I could have been fully immersed. Nonetheless, every time I returned to it I felt welcomed in. So many trusted bibliophiles love this book – blogger friends Laila and Laura T.; Emma Milne-White, owner of Hungerford Bookshop, who plugged it at their 2023 summer reading celebration; and Maris Kreizman, who in a recent newsletter described this as “One of my favorite summer reading novels ever … escapist magic, a lush historical novel.”
I’m relieved to report that Beautiful Ruins lived up to everyone’s acclaim – and my own high expectations after enjoying Walter’s So Far Gone, which I reviewed for BookBrowse earlier in the summer. I was immediately captivated by the shabby glamour of Pasquale’s hotel in Porto Vergogna on the coast of northern Italy. With refreshing honesty, he’s dubbed the place “Hotel Adequate View.” In April 1962, he’s attempting to build a cliff-edge tennis court when a boat delivers beautiful, dying American actress Dee Moray. It soon becomes clear that her condition is nothing nine months won’t fix and she’s been dumped here to keep her from meddling in the romance between the leads in Cleopatra, filming in Rome. In the present day, an elderly Pasquale goes to Hollywood to find out whatever happened to Dee.
A myriad of threads and formats – a movie pitch, a would-be Hemingway’s first chapter of a never-finished wartime masterpiece, an excerpt from a producer’s autobiography and a play transcript – coalesce to flesh out what happened in that summer of 1962 and how the last half-century has treated all the supporting players. True to the tone of a novel about regret, failure and shattered illusions, Walter doesn’t tie everything up neatly, but he does offer a number of the characters a chance at redemption. This felt to me like a warmer and more timeless version of A Visit from the Goon Squad. There are so many great scenes, none better than Richard Burton’s drunken visit to Porto Vergogna, which had me in stitches. Fantastic. (Hungerford Bookshop – 40th birthday gift from my husband from my wish list) 
Every Day Is Mother’s Day (Three on a Theme)
It’s Mother’s Day in the UK today, so I’m featuring three books about mothers and motherhood: a poetry collection, a memoir, and a novel. There are complicated emotions at play in all of these books, whether because of the loss of a child, a mother’s misbehaviour, or a combination of abuse and unfitness.
Her Birth by Rebecca Goss (2013)
Goss’s first child, Ella, died at 16 months of a rare heart condition, Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly. This collection is in three parts, the first recreating vignettes from her daughter’s short life, the purgatorial central section dwelling in the aftermath of grief, and the third summoning the courage to have another baby. “So extraordinary was your sister’s / short life, it’s hard for me to see // a future for you. I know it’s there, … yet I can’t believe // my fortune”. The close focus on physical artefacts and narrow slices of memory wards away mawkishness. The poems are sweetly affecting but never saccharine. “I kept a row of lilac-buttoned relics / in my wardrobe. Hand-knitted proof, something/ to haul my sorry lump of heart and make it blaze.” (New purchase from Bookshop UK with buyback credit) 
How to Survive Your Mother by Jonathan Maitland (2006)
I can’t remember where I came across this in the context of recommended family memoirs, but the title and premise were enough to intrigue me. I’d not previously heard of Maitland, who at the time was known for a TV investigative reporting show called Watchdog exposing con artists. The irony: he was soon to discover that his own mother was a con artist. By chance, he met a journalist who recalled a scandal involving his parents’ old folks’ homes. Maitland toggles between flashbacks to his earlier life and fragments from his investigation, which involved archival research but mostly interviews with his estranged sister, his mother’s ex-husbands, and more.
Bru was a larger-than-life character: Israeli, obsessed with cars and personal upkeep – she once lied to her son that she’d had “eyebrow cancer” rather than admit to having had a facelift, and prone to suicide attempts and other grand gestures, such as opening a “gay hotel” in the 1970s. It eventually emerges that she talked an old man under her care into changing his will to make her his sole beneficiary; she and Maitland’s father also borrowed money from other vulnerable elderly customers. No doubt Bru had narcissistic personality disorder. This was interesting for the psychological insight but not so much for the blow-by-blow. It might have made a better novel. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com) 
Every Day Is Mother’s Day by Hilary Mantel (1985)
If you mostly know Mantel for her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, her debut novel, a black comedy, will come as a surprise. Two households become entangled in sordid ways in 1974. The Axons, Evelyn and her intellectually disabled adult daughter, Muriel, live around the corner from Florence Sidney, who still resides in her family home and whose brother Colin lives nearby with his wife and three children (the fourth is on the way). Colin is having an affair with Muriel’s social worker, Isabel Field. Evelyn is dismayed to realize that Muriel has, somehow, fallen pregnant.
Everyone in this short, spiky novel has been neglected by or separated from a mother, and/or finds motherhood oppressive. The picture is bleak indeed. Colin and Florence’s mother is institutionalized; Muriel’s pregnancy is an embarrassment to be hidden; childbirth is a traumatic memory for Evelyn: “She had been left alone to scream, on a high white bed. … The parasite was straining to be away.” But you’ll find humour and delicious creepiness here, too: a dinner party so atrocious you have to laugh; Evelyn’s utter lack of manners and house that seems to be haunted by poltergeists. The offspring of Barbara Comyns and Shirley Jackson, this is also reminiscent of Muriel Spark or early Margaret Atwood.
I could see the seeds of future Mantel (Evelyn is a retired amateur medium – a precursor of the psychic in Beyond Black) but enjoyed this for its own sake. Very annoyingly, when I started reading this and saw on Goodreads that it has a sequel, I glanced at the page for the latter and there was a huge spoiler. Harrumph. Not sure I’ll read Vacant Possession, but this was strong evidence that it’s worth diving into the back catalogue of big-name authors. (Public library)
Winter Reading, Part II: “Snow” Books by Coleman, Rice & Whittell
Here I am squeaking in on the day before the spring equinox – when it’s predicted to be warmer than Ibiza here in southern England, as headlines have it – with a few snowy reads that have been on my stack for much of the winter. I started reading this trio when we got a dusting back in January, in case (as proved to be true) it was our only snow of the year. I have an arresting work of autofiction that recreates a period of postpartum psychosis, a mildly dystopian novel by a First Nations Canadian, and a snow-lover’s compendium of science and trivia.
As it happens, I’ll be starting the spring in the middle of We Do Not Part by Han Kang, which is austerely beautiful and eerily snowy: its narrator traverses a blizzard to rescue her friend’s pet bird; and the friend’s mother recalls a village massacre that left piles of snow-covered corpses. Here Kang muses on the power of snow:
Snow had an unreality to it. Was this because of its pace or its beauty? There was an accompanying clarity to snow as well, especially snow, drifting snow. What was and wasn’t important were made distinct. Certain facts became chillingly apparent. Pain, for one.
The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman (1930)
Coleman (1899–1974), an expatriate American poet, was part of the Paris literary milieu in the 1920s and then the London scene of the 1930s. (She worked with T.S. Eliot on editing Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, for instance.) This novella, her only published work of fiction, was based on her experience of giving birth to her son in 1924, suffering from puerperal fever and a mental breakdown, and being incarcerated in Rochester State Hospital. Although the portrait of Marthe Gail is in the omniscient third person, the stream-of-consciousness style – no speech marks or apostrophes, minimal punctuation – recalls unreliable first-person narration. Marthe believes she is Jesus Christ. Her husband Christopher visits occasionally, hoping she’ll soon be well enough to come home to their baby. It’s hard to believe this was written a century ago; I could imagine it being published tomorrow. It is absolutely worth rediscovering. While I admired the weird lyrical prose (“in his heart was growing a stern and ruddy pear … He would make of his heart a stolen marrow bone and clutch snow crystals in the night to his liking”; “This earth is made of tar and every morsel is stuck upon it to wither … there were orange peelings lying in the snow”), the interactions between patients, nurses and doctors got tedious. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice (2018)
A mysterious total power outage heralds not just the onset of winter or a temporary crisis but the coming of a new era. For this Anishinaabe community, it will require a return to ancient nomadic, hunter-gatherer ways. I was expecting a sinister dystopian; while there are rumours of a more widespread collapse, the focus is on adaptation versus despair, internal resilience versus external threats. Rice reiterates that Indigenous peoples have often had to rebuild their worlds: “Survival had always been an integral part of their culture. It was their history. The skills they needed to persevere in this northern terrain … were proud knowledge held close through the decades of imposed adversity.” As an elder remarks, apocalypse is nothing new. I was more interested in these ideas than in how they played out in the plot. Evan works snow-ploughs until, with food running short and many falling ill, he assumes the grim task of an undertaker. I was a little disappointed that it’s a white interloper breaks their taboos, but it is interesting how he is compared to the mythical windigo in a dream sequence. As short as this novel is, I found it plodding, especially in the first half. It does pick up from that point (and there is a sequel). I was reminded somewhat of Sherman Alexie. It was probably my first book by an Indigenous Canadian, which was reason enough to read it, though I wonder if I would warm more to his short stories. (Birthday gift from my wish list last year) 
The Secret Life of Snow: The science and the stories behind nature’s greatest wonder by Giles Whittell (2018)
This is so much like The Snow Tourist by Charlie English it was almost uncanny. Whittell, an English journalist who has written history and travel books, is a snow obsessive and hates that, while he may see a few more major snow events in his lifetime, his children probably won’t experience any in their adulthood. Topics in the chatty chapters include historical research into snowflakes, meteorological knowledge then and now and the ongoing challenge of forecasting winter storms, record-breaking snowfalls and the places still most likely to have snow cover, and the depiction of snow in medieval paintings (like English, he zeroes in on Bruegel) and Bond films. There’s a bit too much on skiing for my liking: it keeps popping up in segments on the Olympics, avalanches, and how famous snow spots are reckoning with their uncertain economic future. It’s a fun and accessible book with many an eye-popping statistic, but, coming as it did a decade after English’s, does sound the alarm more shrilly about the future of snow. As in, we’ll get maybe 15 more years (until 2040), before overall warming means it will only fall as rain. “That idea, like death, is hard to think about without losing your bearings, which is why, aware of my cowardice and moral abdication, I prefer to think of the snowy present and recent past rather than of the uncertain future.” (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury) 
Whittell’s mention of the U.S. East Coast “Snowmaggedon” of February 2010 had me digging out photos my mother sent me of the aftermath at our family home of the time.
Any wintry reading (or weather) for you lately? Or is it looking like spring?
Three on a Theme: Christmas Novellas I (Re-)Read This Year
I wasn’t sure I’d manage any holiday-appropriate reading this year, but thanks to their novella length I actually finished three, two in advance and one in a single sitting on the day itself. Two of these happen to be in translation: little slices of continental Christmas.
Twelve Nights by Urs Faes (2018; 2020)
[Translated from the German by Jamie Lee Searle]
In this Swiss novella, the Twelve Nights between Christmas and Epiphany are a time of mischief when good folk have to protect themselves from the tricks of evil spirits. Manfred has trekked back to his home valley hoping to make things right with his brother, Sebastian. They have been estranged for several decades – since Sebastian unexpectedly inherited the family farm and stole Manfred’s sweetheart, Minna. These perceived betrayals were met with a vengeful act of cruelty (but why oh why did it have to be against an animal?). At a snow-surrounded inn, Manfred convalesces and tries to summon the courage to show up at Sebastian’s door. At only 84 small-format pages, this is more of a short story. The setting and spare writing are appealing, as is the prospect of grace extended. But this was over before it began; it didn’t feel worth what I paid. Perhaps I would have been happier to encounter it in an anthology or a longer collection of Faes’s short fiction. (Secondhand – Hungerford Bookshop)
Through a Glass, Darkly by Jostein Gaarder (1993; 1998)
[Translated from the Norwegian by Elizabeth Rokkan]
On Christmas Day, Cecilia is mostly confined to bed, yet the preteen experiences the holiday through the sounds and smells of what’s happening downstairs. (What a cosy first page!)
Her father later carries her down to open her presents: skis, a toboggan, skates – her family has given her all she asked for even though everyone knows she won’t be doing sport again; there is no further treatment for her terminal cancer. That night, the angel Ariel appears to Cecilia and gets her thinking about the mysteries of life. He’s fascinated by memory and the temporary loss of consciousness that is sleep. How do these human processes work? “I wish I’d thought more about how it is to live,” Cecilia sighs, to which Ariel replies, “It’s never too late.” Weeks pass and Ariel engages Cecilia in dialogues and takes her on middle-of-the-night outdoor adventures, always getting her back before her parents get up to check on her. The book emphasizes the wonder of being alive: “You are an animal with the soul of an angel, Cecilia. In that way you’ve been given the best of both worlds.” This is very much a YA book and a little saccharine for me, but at least it was only 161 pages rather than the nearly 400 of Sophie’s World. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2021)
I idly reread this while The Muppet Christmas Carol played in the background on a lazy, overfed Christmas evening.
It was an odd experience: having seen the big-screen adaptation just last month, the blow-by-blow was overly familiar to me and I saw Cillian Murphy and Emily Watson, if not the minor actors, in my mind’s eye. I realized fully just how faithful the screenplay is to the book. The film enhances not just the atmosphere but also the plot through the visuals. It takes what was so subtle in the book – blink-and-you’ll-miss-it – and makes it more obvious. Normally I might think it a shame to undermine the nuance, but in this case I was glad of it. Bill Furlong’s midlife angst and emotional journey, in particular, are emphasized in the film. It was probably a mistake to read this a third time within so short a span of time; it often takes me more like 5–10 years to appreciate a book anew. So I was back to my ‘nice little story’ reaction this time, but would still recommend this to you – book or film – if you haven’t yet experienced it. (Free at a West Berkshire Council recycling event)
Previous ratings: (2021 review); 
(2022 review)
My rating this time:
We hosted family for Christmas for the first time, which truly made me feel like a proper grown-up. It was stressful and chaotic but lovely and over all too soon. Here’s my lil’ book haul (but there was also a £50 book token, so I will buy many more!).
I hope everyone has been enjoying the holidays. I have various year-end posts in progress but of course the final Best-of list and statistics will have to wait until the turning of the year.
Coming up:
Sunday 29th: Best Backlist Reads of the Year
Monday 30th: Love Your Library & 2024 Reading Superlatives
Tuesday 31st: Best Books of 2024
Wednesday 1st: Final statistics on 2024’s reading
Three on a Theme: English Gardeners (Bradbury, Laing and Mabey)
These three 2024 releases share a passion for gardening – but not the old-fashioned model of bending nature to one’s will to create aesthetically pleasing landscapes. Instead, the authors are also concerned with sustainability and want to do the right thing in a time of climate crisis (all three mention the 2022 drought, which saw the first 40 °C day being recorded in the UK). They seek to strike a balance between human interference and letting a site go wild, and they are cognizant of the wider political implications of having a plot of land of one’s own. All three were borrowed from the public library. #LoveYourLibrary
One Garden against the World: In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate by Kate Bradbury
Bradbury is Wildlife Editor of BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine and makes television appearances in the UK. She’s owned her suburban Brighton home for four years and has tried to turn its front and back gardens into havens, however small, for wildlife. The book covers April 2022 to June 2023, spotlighting the drought summer. “It’s about a little garden in south Portslade and one terrified, angry gardener.” Month by month, present-tense chapters form not quite a diary, but a record of what she’s planting, pruning, relocating, and so on. There is also a species profile at the end of each chapter, usually of an insect (as in the latest Dave Goulson book) – she’s especially concerned that she’s seeing fewer, yet she’s worried for local birds, trees and hedgehogs, too.
Often, she takes matters into her own hands. She plucks caterpillars from vegetation in the path of strimmers in the park and raises them at home; protects her garden’s robins from predators and provides enough food so they can nest and raise five fledglings; undertakes to figure out where her pond’s amphibians have come from; rescues hedgehogs; and bravely writes to neighbours who have scaffolding up (for roof repairs, etc.) beseeching them to put up swift boxes while they’re at it. Sometimes it works: a pub being refurbished by new owners happily puts up sparrow boxes when she tells them the birds have always nested in crevices in the building. Sometimes it doesn’t; people ignore her letters and she can’t seem to help but take it personally.
For individuals, it’s all too easy to be overtaken by anxiety, helplessness and despair, and Bradbury acknowledges that collective action and solidarity are vital. “I am reminded, once again, that it’s the community that will save these trees, not me. I’m reminded that community is everything.” She bands together with other environmentally minded people to resist a local development, educate the public about hedgehogs through talks, and oppose “Drone Bastard,” who flies drones at seagulls nesting on rooftops (not strictly illegal; disappointingly, their complaint doesn’t get anywhere with the police, RSPB or RSPCA).
Along the way, there are a few insights into the author’s personal life. She lives with her partner Emma and dog Tosca and accesses wild walks even right on the edge of a city in the Downs. Separate visits to her divorced parents are chances for more nature spotting – in Suffolk to see her father, she hears her first curlew and lapwings – but also involve some sadness, as her mother has aphasia and fatigue after a stroke.
Nearly every day of the chronology seems to bring more bad news for nature. “It’s hard, sometimes,” she admits, “trying to enjoy natural, wonderful events, trying to keep the clawing sense of unease at bay”. She is staunch in her fond stance: “I will love it, with all my heart, whatever has managed to remain, whatever is left.” And she models through her own amazingly biodiverse garden the ways we can extend refuge to other creatures if we throw out that pointless notion of ‘tidiness.’ “The UK’s 30 million gardens represent 30 million opportunities to create green spaces that hold on to water and carbon, create shade, grow food and provide habitats for wildlife that might otherwise not survive.” Reading this made me feel less guilty about the feral tangle of buddleia, ragwort, hemp agrimony and bindweed overtaking the parts of our back garden that aren’t given over to meadow, pond and hedge. Every time I venture back there I see tons of insects and spiders, and that’s all that matters.
My main critique is that one year would have been adequate, cutting the book to 250 pages rather than 300 and ensuring less repetition while still being a representative time period. But Bradbury is impressive for her vigilance and resolve. Some might say that she takes herself and life too seriously, but it’s really more that she’s aware of the scale of destruction already experienced and realistic about what we stand to lose.
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing
I consider Laing one of our most important public thinkers. I saw her introduce the book via the online Edinburgh Book Festival event “In Search of Eden,” in which she appeared on screen and was interviewed by JC Niala. Laing explained that this is not a totally new topic for her as she has been involved in environmental activism and in herbalism. But in 2020, when she and her much older husband bought a house in Suffolk – the first home she has owned after a life of renting – she started restoring its walled garden, which had been created in the 1960s by Mark Rumary. For a year, she watched and waited to see what would happen in the garden, only removing obvious weeds. This coincided with lockdown, so visits to gardens and archives were limited; she focused more on the creation of her own garden and travelling through literature. A two-year diary resulted, in seven notebooks.
Niala observed that the structure of the book, with interludes set in the Suffolk garden, means that the reader has a place to come back to between the deep dives into history. Why make a garden? she asked Laing. Beauty, pleasure, activity: these would be pat answers, Laing insisted. Instead, as with all her books, the reason is the impulse to make complicated structures. Repetitive tasks can be soothing; “the drudgery can be compelling as well.”
Laing spoke of a garden as both refuge and resistance, a mix of wild and cultivated. In this context, Derek Jarman’s Dungeness garden was a “wellspring of inspiration” for her, “a riposte to a toxic atmosphere” of nuclear power and the AIDS crisis (Rumary, like Jarman, was gay). It’s hard to tell where the beach ends and his garden begins, she noted, and she tried to make her garden similarly porous by kicking a hole in the door so frogs could get in. She hopes it will be both vulnerable and robust, a biodiversity hotspot. With Niala, she discussed the idea of a garden as a return to innocence. We have a “tarnished Eden” due to climate change, and we have to do what we can to reverse that.
The event was brilliant – just the level of detail I wanted, with Laing flitting between subjects and issuing amazingly intelligent soundbites. The book, though, seemed like page after page about Milton (Paradise Lost) and Iris Origo or the Italian Renaissance. I liked it best when it stayed personal to her family and garden project. There are incredible lyric passages, but just stringing together floral species’ names – though they’re lovely and almost incantatory – isn’t art; it also shuts out those of us who don’t know plants, who aren’t natural gardeners. I wasn’t about to Google every plant I didn’t know (though I did for a few). Also, I have read a lot about Derek Jarman in particular. So my reaction was admiration rather than full engagement, and I only gave the book a light skim in the end. It is striking, though, how she makes this subject political by drawing in equality of access and the climate crisis. (Shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize and the Wainwright Prize.) 
Some memorable lines:
“A garden is a time capsule, as well as a portal out of time.”
“A garden is a balancing act, which can take the form of collaboration or outright war. This tension between the world as it is and the world as humans desire it to be is at the heart of the climate crisis, and as such the garden can be a place of rehearsal too, of experimenting with this relationship in new and perhaps less harmful ways.”
“the garden had become a counter to chaos on a personal as well as a political level”
“the more sinister legacy of Eden: the fantasy of perpetual abundance”
The Accidental Garden: Gardens, Wilderness and the Space in Between by Richard Mabey
Mabey gives a day-to-day description of a recent year on his two-acre Norfolk property, but also an overview of the past 20 years of change – which of course pretty much always equates to decline. He muses on wildflowers, growing a meadow and hedgerow, bird behaviour, butterfly numbers, and the weather becoming more erratic and extreme. What he sees at home is a reflection of what is going on in the world at large. “It would be glib to suggest that the immeasurably complex problems of a whole world are mirrored in the small confrontations and challenges of the garden. But maybe the mindset needed for both is the same: the generosity to reset the power balance between ourselves and the natural world.” He seeks to create “a fusion garden” of native and immigrant species, trying to intervene as little as possible. The goal is to tend the land responsibly and leave it better off than he found it. As with the Laing, I found many good passages, but overall I felt this was thin – perhaps reflecting his age and loss of mobility – or maybe a swan song. Again, I just skimmed, even though it’s only 160 pages.
Some memorable lines:
“being Earth’s creatures ourselves, we too have a right to a niche. So in our garden we’ve had more modest ambitions, for ‘parallel development’ you might say, and a sense of neighbourliness with our fellow organisms.”
“We feel embattled at times, and that we should try to make some sort of small refuge, a natural oasis.”
“A garden, with its complex interactions between humans and nature, is often seen as a metaphor for the wider world. But if so, is our plot a microcosm of this troubled arena or a refuge from it?”
You might think I would have been more satisfied by Mabey’s contemplative bent, or Laing’s wealth of literary and historical allusions. It turns out that when it comes to gardening, Bradbury’s practical approach was what I was after. But you may gravitate to any of these, depending on whether you want something for the hands, intellect or memory.
Three on a Theme: Books on Communes by Crossman, Heneghan & Twigg
Communal living always seems like a great idea but rarely works out well. Why? The short answer: Because people. A longer answer: Political ideals are hard to live out in the everyday when egos clash, practical arrangements become annoying, and lines of privacy or autonomy get crossed. All three books I review today are set in the aftermath of utopian failure. Susanna Crossman, who grew up in an English commune, looks back at 15 years of an abnormal childhood. The community in Birdeye is set to collapse after two founding members announce their departure, leaving one ageing woman and her disabled daughter. And in Spoilt Creatures, from a decade’s distance, Iris narrates the disastrous downfall of Breach House.
Home Is Where We Start: Growing up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream by Susanna Crossman
For Crossman’s mother, “the community” was a refuge, a place to rebuild their family’s life after divorce and the death of her oldest daughter in a freak accident. For her three children, it initially was a place of freedom and apparent equality between “the Adults” and “the Kids” – who were swiftly indoctrinated into hippie opinions on the political matters of the day. “There is no difference between private and public conversations, between the inside and the outside. No euphemisms. Vaginas are discussed over breakfast alongside domestic violence and nuclear bombs.” Crossman’s present-tense recreation of her precocious eight-year-old perspective is canny, as when she describes watching Charles and Diana’s wedding on television:
It was beautiful, but I know marriage is a patriarchal institution, a capitalist trap, a snare. You can read about it in Spare Rib, or if you ask community members, someone will tell you marriage is legalized rape. It is a construction, and that means it’s not natural, and is part of the social reproduction of gender roles and women’s unpaid domestic labour.
Their mum, now known only as “Alison,” often seemed unaware of what the Kids got up as they flitted in and out of each other’s units. Crossman once electrocuted herself at a plug. Another time she asked if she could go to an adult man’s unit for an offered massage. Both times her mother was unfazed.
The author is now a clinical arts therapist, so her recreation is informed by her knowledge of healthy child development and the long-term effects of trauma. She knows the Kids suffered from a lack of routine and individually expressed love. Community rituals, such as opening Christmas presents in the middle of a circle of 40 onlookers, could be intimidating rather than welcoming. Her molestation and her sister’s rape (when she was nine years old, on a trip to India ‘supervised’ by two other adults from the community) were cloaked in silence.
Crossman weaves together memoir and psychological theory as she examines where the utopian impulse comes from and compares her own upbringing with how she tries to parent her three daughters differently at home in France. Through vignettes based on therapy sessions with patients, she shows how play and the arts can help. (I’d forgotten that I’ve encountered Crossman’s writing before, through her essay on clowning for the Trauma anthology.) I somewhat lost interest as the Kids grew into teenagers. It’s a vivid and at times rather horrifying book, but the author doesn’t resort to painting pantomime villains. Behind things were good intentions, she knows, and there is nuance and complexity to her account. It’s a great mix of being back in the moment and having the hindsight to see it all clearly.
With thanks to Fig Tree (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
Birdeye by Judith Heneghan
Like Crossman’s community, the Birdeye Colony is based in a big crumbling house in the countryside – but this time in the USA; the Catskills of upstate New York, to be precise. Liv Ferrars has been the de facto leader for nearly 50 years, since she was a young mother to twins. Now she’s a sixty-seven-year-old breast cancer survivor. To her amazement, her book, The Attentive Heart, still attracts visitors, “bringing their problems, their pain and loneliness, hoping to be mended, made whole.”
One of the ur-plots is “a stranger comes to town,” and that’s how Birdeye opens, with the arrival of a young man named Conor who’s read and admired Liv’s book, and seems to know quite a lot about the place. When Indian American siblings Sonny and Mishti, the only others who have been there almost from the beginning, announce that they’re leaving, it seems Birdeye is doomed. But Liv wonders if Conor can be part of a new generation to take it on.
It’s a bit of a sleepy book, with a touch of suspense as secrets emerge from Birdeye’s past. I was slightly reminded of May Sarton’s Kinds of Love. I most appreciated the character study of Liv and her very different relationships with her daughters, who are approaching fifty: Mary is a capable lawyer in London, while Rose suffered oxygen deprivation at birth and is severely intellectually disabled. Since Liv’s illness, Mary has pressured her to make plans for Rose’s future and, ultimately, her own. The duty of care we bear towards others – blood family; the chosen family of friends and comrades, even pets – arises as a major theme. I’d recommend this to those who love small-town novels.
With thanks to Salt Publishing for the free copy for review.
& 20 Books of Summer, #20:
Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg
Alas, this proved to be another disappointment from the Observer’s 10 best new novelists feature (following How We Named the Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica). The setup was promising: in 2008, Iris reeling from her break-up from Nathan and still grieving her father’s death in a car accident, goes to live at Breach House after a chance meeting with Hazel, one of the women’s commune’s residents. “Breach House was its own ecosystem, removed from the malfunctioning world of indecision and patriarchy.” Any attempts to mix with the outside world go awry, and the women gain a reputation as strange and difficult. I never got a handle on the secondary characters, who fill stock roles (the megalomaniac leader, the reckless one, the disgruntled one), and it all goes predictably homoerotic and then Lord of the Flies. The dual-timeline structure with Iris’s reflections from 10 years later adds little. An example of the commune plot done poorly, with shallow conclusions rather than deeper truths at play.
With thanks to Tinder Press for the free copy for review.
On this topic, I have also read:
Novels:
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
On my TBR:
O Sinners by Nicole Cuffy
We Burn Daylight by Bret Anthony Johnston
Nonfiction:
Heaven Is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk
Three on a Theme: Tiger Novels (Polly Clark, Tania James, Téa Obreht)
I was sent Loot for review, picked The Tiger’s Wife – a reread for me – as our February book club book, and then couldn’t resist making it a trio with Tiger as it was also a good excuse to pick up a book that had sat on my shelves unread for several years. In all three, the tiger is an emblem of wildness and mystery – and often of danger, too (“you must rid us of this devil in his fiery pajamas,” the village priest begs the hunter in The Tiger’s Wife).
Tiger by Polly Clark (2019)
I was fully engaged with the 150 or so pages of Part I, which is narrated by Dr Frieda Bloom, a zookeeper knowledgeable about and fascinated by bonobos. She’s also a morphine addict who continues to justify using at work (not to mention stealing from the veterinary supplies) until she is caught and fired. It’s all in response to a random act of violence: a man attacked her outside a Tube station late one night and she was lucky to have survived the head injury. In ignominy, she moves from a prestigious research institute to a rundown local zoo where the star new acquisition is an injured tiger named Luna. She develops an amazing rapport with Luna, even spending time in the enclosure with her. Meanwhile, the macho behaviour of her colleague Gabriel makes it seem like Frieda could be a victim again at any time.
But then we jump back in time and to the Russian taiga to meet, through third-person segments, a conservationist who hears about a mighty Siberian tigress, and a mother and daughter who encounter her for themselves. This turns out to be “the Countess,” Luna’s mother, and Frieda, a few years on now, travels to Russia herself to bring back one of Luna’s cubs. The focus, as the title signals, is on the tiger herself, but my interest was only ever in Frieda, and it was a little confusing how quickly she switches allegiance from primates to tigers. More first-person narration might have kept me engaged, or maybe a different order to the sections? Anything to keep me latching onto Frieda and missing her for most of the book. (Instagram giveaway win) 
Loot by Tania James (2023)
A halfhearted skim. It’s a shame that when I was offered this for review I didn’t remember I’d read something by Tania James before. The Tusk that Did the Damage, from 2016, is a composite picture of the state of wildlife conservation in India told from three perspectives: an elephant named The Gravedigger, a poacher, and a documentary filmmaker. That was a book I had to force myself through because of the lacklustre storytelling and character development, and I found the same here. Historical fiction can be tedious when it assumes that an unusual setting and intriguing incident are enough to maintain reader interest. Abbas, a woodcarver, is only 17 when he is taken to the sultan’s palace to be apprenticed to a French clockmaker. Together, they create the real-life automaton known as Tippoo’s Tiger and held at the V&A Museum. When the automaton is plundered, Abbas sets out on a quest to rescue it. I never warmed to any of the characters here, even though du Leze’s adopted daughter Jehanne is a promising one. If it’s automata that intrigue you, read The Weather Woman instead. 
[Now on the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction longlist]
With thanks to Harvill Secker for the free copy for review.
The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (2011)
What I remembered: a wartime Eastern European (Bosnian?) story that incorporated legends.
What I rediscovered:
Natalia, a medical worker in a war-ravaged country, learns of her grandfather’s death away from home. The only one who knew the secret of his cancer, she sneaks away from an orphanage vaccination program to reclaim his personal effects, hoping they’ll reveal something about why he went on this final trip. Something is missing from his belongings: his beloved copy of The Jungle Book, which sparked a lifelong fascination with tigers. When war broke out mid-century and a tiger escaped from the zoo, he was nine years old. He and the butcher’s wife, a pregnant, deaf-mute Muslim woman with whom he communicated by scratching images in the dirt, were thrilled by the tiger’s nocturnal skulking rather than frightened like the rest of the villagers. Her outcast status led people to ignore the fact that she was a victim of domestic violence and to spin tales about her unnatural connection with the tiger, spreading rumours about the child she was carrying (“The Tiger’s Wife”).
In the years to come, during Natalia’s grandfather’s career as a doctor, he had several encounters with Gavran Gailé, “The Deathless Man,” a troubadour who seemed, vampire- or zombie-like, to survive every attempt on his life. In service to his uncle, Gavran Gailé read people’s coffee grounds to inform them of their impending death, but his own cup was bare and unbreakable. Natalia’s grandfather, a man of science, didn’t believe Gavran Gailé’s claims and agreed to a wager. Gavran Gailé would walk into a lake, tied up in chains attached to cement blocks, and pull on a rope when he started drowning. His pledge was his cup; the doctor’s was The Jungle Book, his most treasured possession. But as promised, Gavran Gailé spent an hour underwater and emerged from the lake none the worse the wear.
Natalia knows her grandfather’s final journey must have been to meet The Deathless Man, who collected on his pledge. She’ll have her own encounter with him before the end.
This is a demanding read, in that there are not a lot of orienting details and the several storylines surge in and out through flashbacks and oral storytelling. It takes effort and commitment to keep reading in the hope that everything will come together. This was a flop for my book club in that only three people had read it so we decided it wasn’t worth meeting. One who did finish it commented that it felt like three separate stories, and I see what she means. Obreht could certainly have made the links and chronology more obvious. Instead, each chapter is such a honed and self-contained narrative, often focused on a different peripheral character, that the book almost reads like a set of linked short stories. On this reread I was absolutely entranced, especially by the sections about The Deathless Man. I had forgotten the medical element, which of course I loved.
It can be depressing looking back at amateur reviews I wrote in my pre-freelancing days because I have not notably advanced since then. This response I wrote when I read the brand-new book in 2011 is allusive, opinionated, and admirably absent of dull plot summary. Could I do any better now if I tried? (Though I think I maybe misunderstood the ending back then.)
Had I reread this sooner, it would have been tough to choose between it and Larry’s Party, my ultimate selection, for the Women’s Prize Winners 25th anniversary reader vote. Were I to vote again today, I’d join Laura in choosing The Tiger’s Wife instead. (Public library)
My original rating (2011): 
My rating now: 
Eleanor recently reviewed it, too.
There was a clear winner here: The Tiger’s Wife!
See also Laura’s fab series on tiger novels from her old blog. This is the first post and there are more listed in the right-hand sidebar.
I searched my Goodreads library for others I’ve read and the only books she didn’t cover were Nick Harkaway’s Tigerman, a disappointment after Angelmaker; and (nonfiction) Margaux Fragoso’s Tiger, Tiger (title from a William Blake line), a memoir of childhood sexual abuse, and Ruth Padel’s Tigers in Red Weather, a travelogue – it happens to share a title with Liza Klausmann’s novel, which is likewise named after a line in the Wallace Stevens poem “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock.”
Three on a Theme: “Rainbow” Books for Pride Month
Two of these are short story collections (and one almost is); two are specifically queer in outlook; all attracted me for their colorful covers, and all were borrowed from the library. #LoveYourLibrary
Rainbow Rainbow: Stories by Lydia Conklin (2022)
The 10 stories in this confident debut collection are unabashedly queer, and half involve the trans experience, whether ideation or reality. Conklin is nonbinary, so it’s tempting to read several stories as autobiographical: female characters long to get top surgery and transition to male or nonbinary, but worry it will change how they are perceived or desired. “Pink Knives” and “Boy Jump,” especially, have the flavor of autofiction, with protagonists traveling in Poland and feeling attraction to people of various genders. (The former has a pandemic setting, which I’ve noticed has at this point started to feel dated.) My overall favorite was “Sunny Talks,” in which middle-aged Lillia accompanies her trans teenage nephew to a conference for celebrity YouTubers but can’t bring herself to announce her own intended transition. Though life hasn’t been easy for Sunny, he has support she lacked growing up.
Asher and Ivan, two characters of nebulous sexuality and future gender, are the core of “Cheerful Until Next Time” (check out the acronym), which has the fantastic opening line “The queer feminist book club came to an end.” “Laramie Time” stars a lesbian couple debating whether to have a baby (in the comic Leigh draws, a turtle wishes “reproduction was automatic or mandatory, so no decision was necessary”). “A Fearless Moral Inventory” features a pansexual who is a recovering sex addict. Adolescent girls are the focus in “The Black Winter of New England” and “Ooh, the Suburbs,” where they experiment with making lesbian leanings public and seeking older role models. “Pioneer,” probably my second favorite, has Coco pushing against gender constraints at a school Oregon Trail reenactment. Refusing to be a matriarch and not allowed to play a boy, she rebels by dressing up as an ox instead. The tone is often bleak or yearning, so “Counselor of My Heart” stands out as comic even though it opens with the death of a dog; Molly’s haplessness somehow feels excusable.
Six of the stories are in the third person and four in first person. I’d be interested to try Conklin’s longer-form work, and think first-person narration would particularly suit her. I didn’t really sense that this was a book meant for me, but that’s okay; a lot of readers will feel seen and represented. Pair this with, or have it on hand as a follow-up to, work by Allison Blevins, Melissa Febos and, most of all, Eley Williams. 
Under the Rainbow by Celia Laskey (2020)
In Laskey’s debut, which has been marketed as a novel but reads more like linked short stories, a favorite format of mine, researchers have identified Big Burr, Kansas as the most homophobic town in America. A task force from Acceptance Across America descends on the rural backwater for a targeted two-year program promoting education and friendship. Each chapter is a first-person, present-tense confession from a local or a queer visitor, whose stories interlock and push the chronology forward. For every positive step – a gender-neutral bathroom in the high school, a closeted individual who summons up the courage to come out – there is a regressive one, such as a AAA billboard being set on fire or a house being egged.
Laskey inhabits all 11 personae with equal skill and compassion. Avery, the task force leader’s daughter, resents having to leave L.A. and plots an escape with her new friend Zach, a persecuted gay teen. Christine, a Christian homemaker, is outraged about the liberal agenda, whereas her bereaved neighbor, Linda, finds purpose and understanding in volunteering at the AAA office. Food hygiene inspector Henry is thrown when his wife leaves him for a woman, and meat-packing maven Lizzie agonizes over the question of motherhood. Task force members David, Tegan and Harley all have their reasons for agreeing to the project, but some characters have to sacrifice more than others.
Little references in later chapters catch you up on what’s happened with the others. I only questioned the need for Elsie as a POV character, and the exclusion of Jamal (presumably Laskey thought it unwise to write from the perspective of a Black man, but he’s a glaring omission). A final chapter, returning to one of the protagonists and set 10 years later, presents a town that’s changed enough to host its first gay wedding and first LGBTQ-owned business.
The novel is realistically sad, but not overly so, and was compellingly readable and heartwarming in a way that reminded me of how I felt about Shotgun Lovesongs. You might not want to live there, but I guarantee you’ll develop a certain fondness for Big Burr.
Scattered Showers: Stories by Rainbow Rowell; illus. Jim Tierney (2022)
I spotted this collection while shelving in the YA section of the library one day and admired the sky blue naked hardback for its red sprayed edges, chunky rainbow endpapers, distinctive font, and teal and magenta interior color scheme. I’d read one Rowell book before, the graphic novel Pumpkinheads. This is probably a better match for her dedicated fans in that three of the stories are spin-offs from her fiction and a few of the rest are one-offs (Amazon Original Stories, a World Book Day publication, a contribution to an anthology), such that I felt a little like I was reading leftovers. A B-sides volume, if you will.
Four of the nine are holiday-themed, so this could make a good Twixtmas read if you like seasonality; eight are in the third person and just one has alternating first person narrators. All are what could be broadly dubbed romances, with most involving meet-cutes or moments when long-time friends realize their feelings go deeper (“Midnights” and “The Snow Ball”). Only one of the pairings is queer, however: Baz and Simon (who are a vampire and … a dragon-man, I think? and the subjects of a trilogy) in the Harry Potter-meets Twilight-meets Heartstopper “Snow for Christmas.” The rest are pretty straightforward boy-girl stories.
I liked “Kindred Spirits,” in which Elena joins a small group (“three cold nerds”) of hardcore Star Wars fans waiting in line for the first sequel and notices Gabe, a classmate, as if for the first time; “Winter Songs for Summer,” in which a sensitive jock proves he knows his upstairs dorm mate better than anyone through the breakup-recovery tracks he puts on a mix CD for her; and “If the Fates Allow,” about Nebraska neighbors who bond over Jell-O salad during a couple of pandemic Christmases.
I wasn’t as enamored by the couple of fantasy stories, “The Prince and the Troll,” a fairy tale twisted into a vague environmental dystopian parable (“This isn’t easy. This is just another kind of hard. That’s all that’s left now, for any of us”), and “In Waiting,” about the evolving characters incubating in a writer’s head. “Mixed Messages” was refreshing for having middle-aged characters, two friends texting back and forth to try to work out whether the one missed a period because she’s pregnant or in perimenopause, but I doubt I’d be tempted to seek out the book these characters originated in (Attachments), or any of Rowell’s others.
There was a clear winner here: Under the Rainbow!
Extra goodies:
Celebrate Pride Month! The Bookshop.org team has curated this list of books by LGBTQIA+ authors for you to enjoy. Please enjoy 20% OFF all titles. [affiliate link]
A song Sufjan Stevens wrote for Pride Month 2019.
Three on a Theme for Valentine’s Day: “Love” Short Story Collections
Even though I’m really not a Valentine’s Day sort of person*, this is the seventh year in a row that I’ve put together a themed post featuring books that have “Love” or a similar word in the title in the run-up to mid-February (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022).
I also don’t generally read short story collections if it’s not September – I seem to need that alliterative crutch to get to a dozen or so of them – but my “Birds” trio and these three were so great that I had to wonder why I don’t read them all year round.
Are these love stories? Some, to an extent. But also loss stories. Loneliness stories. Hatred stories. Abandonment stories. A few even verge on horror. In other words, realistic slivers of life. And as different as Carver’s lean, masculine tales of addiction and failure might seem from Bloom’s wry scenes of family life and Dunmore’s intimate pictures of isolation and mental illness, I found that all three resonated with each other. As for character detail, Dunmore’s “fat men” echo the overweight male protagonist in Bloom’s first story cycle.
Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom (2010)
One of these stories, “Sleepwalking,” was familiar to me because it is reprinted from her 1993 collection, Come to Me, and another two were originally published in 2000’s A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You – isn’t she great at titles?! She excels at first lines, too: some from this volume are “At two o’clock in the morning, no one is to blame,” “William has gout,” “Clare can’t walk,” “No power” and “I had always planned to kill my father.”
The book contains two quartets of linked stories and four stand-alone stories. The first set is about Clare and William, whose dynamic shifts from acquaintances to couple-friends to lovers to spouses. Bloom, a former psychotherapist, is interested in tracking how they navigate these changes over the years, and does so by switching between first- and third-person narration and adopting a different perspective for each story. She does the same with the four stories about Lionel and Julia, a Black man and his white stepmother. Over the course of maybe three decades, we see the constellations of relationships each one forms, while the family core remains. She also includes sexual encounters between characters who are middle-aged and older – when, according to stereotypes, lust should have been snuffed out.
Of the unlinked stories, the most memorable was “By-and-By,” a distressingly unemotional account of the ripple effects of a serial killer’s actions as seen by a victim’s roommate. I also loved the title story, which appears last. An older man and his daughter-in-law meet twice, by accident, in small-town eateries, the one wanting to come clean about a troubled past and the other wanting to embark on a new and surprising romance. This one reminded me of Richard Russo and early John Irving, while the collection as a whole would suit fans of Julia Glass, Tessa Hadley, Sue Miller, Lorrie Moore and Elizabeth Strout. (Secondhand – Bookbarn International)
What We Talk about When We Talk about Love by Raymond Carver (1981)
Such a famous title that it has spawned countless imitators, two of which I’ve even read (What We Talk about When We Talk about God by Rob Bell and What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank by Nathan Englander). It turns out I had Carver confused with John Cheever, so I was expecting gritty stories of alcoholism in the 1950s Midwest. Yes to the alcohol abuse, but Carver was from the Pacific Northwest and was writing in the 1980s. A number of his protagonists are drunk, deadbeat dads who have been kicked out and make a scene to get back at their wives. Others are more passive, stuck in suburban ennui. Grown men fear turning into their fathers (“Sacks”). Ultimatums are defused (“Everything Stuck to Him”) and custody arrangements fought over (the Solomonic fable “Popular Mechanics”).
The declarative simplicity of the prose, and the interest in male activities like gambling, hunting and fishing, can’t fail to recall Ernest Hemingway, yet I warmed to Carver much more than Hem. Two of these stories struck me as feminist for how they expose nonchalant male violence towards women; elsewhere I spotted tiny gender-transgressing details (a man who knits, for instance). In “Tell the Women We’re Going,” two men escape their families to play pool and drink, then make a fateful decision on the way home. I don’t think I’ve been as shocked by the matter-of-fact brutality of a short story since “The Lottery.” My favourite was also chilling, “So Much Water So Close to Home.” Both reveal how homosocial peer pressure leads to bad behaviour; this was toxic masculinity before we had that term.
Many of the stories are only 3–8 pages long, such that 17 fit into a slender volume. They’re about half and half first- and third-person, sometimes with speech marks and sometimes not. At 15 pages, the title story is the longest and a great one. Two couples are having pre-dinner drinks and discussing types of love – physical, spiritual and so on. The POV character mostly conveys monologues by his friend Mel, a cardiologist (of course he would be a heart doctor!), comparing the obsessive love of his first wife’s ex, who turned out to be a stalker, and the mature devotion he saw in an elderly couple at his hospital after a horrific car accident. There were a few flippant or less memorable stories in here, but I’m impressed enough to seek out more of Carver’s work, poetry or prose. (Secondhand – Books for Amnesty, York)
Love of Fat Men by Helen Dunmore (1997)
This was an early work by Dunmore, who was so prolific in her two-decade career that I still come across titles of hers that I’ve never heard of before. I don’t think a book by this title would get published nowadays, but I won’t hold it against her. It is literal in that Ulli, a recurring character in 10 of these 19 stories, finds comfort in sleeping with larger men. I wondered what so captured Dunmore’s imagination about Scandinavia: you can work out that Ulli is from Finland and most of the stories are set there or in nearby countries.
Every other story returns to Ulli, but the fragments of her life miss out the connective tissue: we suspect she’s pregnant as a teen, but don’t learn what she chose to do about it; we witness some dysfunctional scenes and realize she’s estranged from her family later on, but don’t find out if there was some big bust-up that prompted it. She comes across as a loner and a nomad, apt to be effaced by stronger personalities. In “The Ice Bear,” she’s on a ferry from Sweden back to Finland and can’t escape the prattle of a male missionary. In “A Question of Latitude” she’s out for a restaurant meal with friends, one of whom diagnoses her thus: “Nothing really affects you, does it? You just smile and put it out of your mind. And you cut people out of your life the same way, when you’ve finished with them.”
Whereas in the Bloom the interconnected stories are the strongest, here my preference was for the others. “The Bridge Painter” is about a man who leaves a peculiar calling card at each bridge he visits. “Annina” paints a woman with a questionable grasp on reality after the loss of a child. Best of all is probably “North Sea Crossing,” which contrasts two father-and-son pairs. If you only know Dunmore from novels, I can recommend her poetry and short stories, too. (Secondhand – Bas Books, Newbury)
All three:
Try all of these authors right away if you haven’t already!
*A daytrip into London on Thursday was our Valentine’s gift to selves. We toured the Tower of London and the Science Museum (the Wellcome medical collections for me) and had an exceptional late lunch at Dishoom (starters and drinks pictured below). Tonight we’ll be having chocolate prune pots in front of The Bookshop Band’s love-themed livestream concert.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 