It's 1617 and a catastrophic storm on the coast of Norway has left a remote northern village with no able-bodied men. The women must learn to fish, hunt, and fend for themselves or they will starve. But in a social and religious environment hostile to independent women, they risk being burned as a witch for trying to survive without men.
I really enjoyed the first half of this novel. The characters were relatable, the descriptions stunning, and the construction of such a harsh, unforgiving setting really sets up the themes of the novel beautifully. From the moment the storm hits Vardø, the novel builds determinedly to its brutal, inescapable conclusion. The way the storm so utterly destroys their lives establishes right away how little control the characters have over their lives. Between the harsh natural environment and the arrival of zealous witch-hunter Absalom, you know what is going to happen to these women in the end. In some ways I like that Hargrave pushed through to the inevitable and brutal conclusion; she doesn't shy away from the reality of what life was like for women and how ultimately powerless they were. It's also worth pointing out that the events she uses to frame her novel are all true. There really was a storm in 1617 that struck Vardø and utterly destroyed communities. Authorities blamed it on witchcraft and there followed mass hysteria and brutal witch trials that saw a significant portion of the local population executed. It would seem trite and insensitive to make such an event seem something that could have been averted if women just stood up for themselves a bit more. Even respecting Hargrave's intent and the harsh truth of what women would have faced in 1617, I wanted something more from the novel. I wanted the characters to fight back, I wanted issues to be explored a little further, boundaries to be pushed more. These events are incredibly tragic, but the novel is not a tragedy. The problem for me lies in the narrative perspective, which I didn't think was nuanced enough to make the novel truly powerful. It ended up being simply brutally predictable and a bit grimly unsatisfying. The narrative perspective is limited to Maren and Ursa, two women who ultimately have a romantic relationship together. Which is the most interesting thing they do, and even that ends up feeling a bit emotionally flat. The most interesting characters, the ones who have the opportunity to raise the intensity of the novel, have no voice. Kirsten and Diinna, arguably the strongest characters in the novel, are effectively footnotes to Maren and Ursa's relationship. I wonder if Hargrave's was trying to emphasise how marginialised and voiceless strong, independent women can be. Whatever her reason, that decision left us with just Maren as a 'strong' voice, a character who spends so much time wavering and hesitating that I lost much of my sympathy for her. You need her perspective, and Ursa's, because they are the voice of the average women, the ordinary people - the Offreds, for fans of The Handmaid's Tale. But the story lacked development of the 'Moiras': the women who are at the heart of the community's survival and regeneration. The ones who inspire the others and bring strength. It felt a bit like Hargrave got caught up in writing the romance between these women and just used the tragic true events as a setting for that. Which meant that the most interesting part of the story was background action. I enjoyed reading The Mercies well enough; it was the first novel in a while that I actually wanted to pick up when I got home from work, but it was not a gripping read, and it is not a story that really stays with you. Much like the rest of what I've read lately, it was disappointingly forgettable. Unfortunately, I also think it was the lid on the coffin that my fledgling bookclub was buried in. Two dull reads in a row? Not something that will keep a brand new bookclub going - not when it was already struggling through a viral pandemic! Who wants to fuss with a Zoom chat for a book they didn't enjoy reading in the first place? TAGS
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At my school we advocate the 'Rights of a Reader'. Those of you who are also English teachers or who have small children might already know what I'm talking about. It's a list of rights that we promote among younger readers to give them confidence around their reading choices, and I think it's a really valuable tool for encouraging reading for pleasure and life-long reading. If you want to read a little more about it, take a look at the article The Rights of a Reader for Young Children - Why They Are Important for a good, succinct spiel. What I've been wondering recently, is whether or not readers (or at least those of us who promote reading in young people) don't also have some responsibilities as well.
I've taught Chimamanda Adichie's speech, 'The Danger of a Single Story', for a few years now and her anecdote about characters in books is another iteration of the debate that's been ongoing in English teaching since I was in high school: why are so many of the books that we teach written by dead white men? I don't think this is strictly true anymore; there's a lot of powerful literature by women that has made its way onto various curriculums, and there's a lot of literature that feature diverse characters and, occasionally, diverse authors. It is still overwhelmingly written by white people though, even if the characters are black or of another ethnic minority. And as Adichie points out so beautifully in her speech, this colours the way children (and adults too) perceive and react to the world. One of the wonderful things about reading, and why it's so important to foster life-long readers in children, is that it broadens your horizons in a way your own experiences might not allow you to. The internet means you can find and read books that your local bookstores or library might not stock, so even someone in the smallest, whitest village in England can experience a broad range of cultures, ethnicities, and ideas, without ever having to leave their small town. But only if books by a range of authors are promoted and made widely accessible. Only if we encourage students to read these books in schools and make it easy for them to be accessed by buying copies for school libraries or getting them access to digital libraries. Reading also helps build empathy. When you see yourself in the characters you are reading about, you learn to see yourself in the people around you. You learn to relate to their situations and what's happening in their lives, which can help reduce prejudice. I'm not saying the cure to racism and prejudice is reading (if only it were that simple!) but empathy goes a long way toward making a difference. This impact can be increased much more so if we are reading diverse stories with a range of characters and from a range of authors, so we can get some experience of other cultures and hear voices that aren't as privileged as our own (from both an ethnic and social class spectrum). It's also important that those narratives aren't always mediated through a white middle-class voice. What I'm trying to say with all this this waffle is that while we have the right to read whatever we want, to not have to defend our choices, and to stop reading if we're not enjoying a book, I think we also have a responsibility to read diversely. To read books by BAME and LGBTQ+ authors. To read books about cultures and religions that you might have no experience or knowledge of. Unfamiliarity isn't going to stop a well-written story from being powerful and engaging. No matter your own circumstances, you can find things to relate to, things to understand and enjoy, because despite our cultural, social, and religious differences, at the end of the day people are people and we are all ultimately concerned with the same things: love, friendship, family, the state of the world and our future, and how to be a good person. Tags
Queenie is probably one of the first audiobooks that I listened to that wasn't just something to do on a long train journey or solitary walk in the park. I listened to this one while tidying up the house, having a bath, and just sitting on the sofa drinking tea and staring into space. I have been on a bit of a book binge just recently, and read (listened) to Queenie in the same week that I read City of Brass and Kingdom of Copper.
Despite the quick listen, I really wasn't sure how much I enjoyed this book until I was quite near the end. It tells the story of Queenie, a black woman living in South East London in a neighbourhood that is slowly becoming gentrified. She has an entry-level job that she can't seem to get anywhere with and a long-term relationship that collapses around her right at the opening of the novel. Between casual racism and the often toxic environment of internet dating, it's not hard to see why she has a complete breakdown. There were so many moments in this novel where I was cringing and thinking, 'can't you see how self-destructive you're being right now?' only to remember my own painfully similar experiences that made my heart break in sympathy. I know, I know: we are talking about a fictional character here, but I expect there are many women who can relate all to easily to much of what Carty-Williams writes. Though Queenie's life is a bit of a train-wreck, the book is well-written. Despite being funny and lightly mocking, it is also a very on-the-nose depiction of the unconscious racism and sexism still commonly at work in our society today. It's not preachy or overly aggressive in the anti-racism message (except for a weird bit at the end, which felt a bit like when your GCSE student gets to the end of a great piece of creative writing and isn't confident in his conclusion so they add, 'and the moral of the story is...' in a completely non-ironic way). It is eye-opening though, because you experience the effect of these subtle discriminatory or disrespectful moments through the eyes of the person being affected. I know I certainly won't think of gentrification in the same way ever again. I do recommend reading this, rather than listening to the audiobook, if you can. It was fine, but I don't think the reader on Audible was very good. She wasn't great at following punctuation in sentences, and I sometimes had to think about what she was saying to realise that the pause she had in the middle wasn't punctuation, she probably reached the end of the line or ran out of breath or something. There were also a lot of quite dry jokes and really funny moments that just fell flat because of how they were delivered. I enjoyed the audiobook, but think that in this case it would be a much better experience of the book to read it yourself, if you can. Tags
I really enjoyed this book - this series, in fact. I immediately started the sequel, Kingdom of Copper, when I finished this first one, and it took me just four days to finish both. As young adult fiction it is fairly light, easy reading, but the plot is gripping and the characters engaging. Alizayd was easily my favourite, and the fact that I normally find the unbending self-righteous types really annoying is testament to how well Chakraborty writes her characters. I also love how the characters are fluid. No one is quite who or what you expect them to be, and it's always a great experience for the reader when the characters can surprise you without feeling like they're acting out of character.
This story is about a young Egyptian girl named Nahri who accidentally summons a djinn warrior. Turns out the magic ceremonies and banishments she scoffs at were very real after all and, during a panicked flight from flesh-eating ghouls in a Cairo cemetery, Nahri learns this is because she's shafit - half human and half-djinn. Her djinn warrior takes her away to Daevabad, a magical city in Persia protected by impenetrable brass walls, where she can be safe from the ghoul-summoning ifrit who are after her. Only she's not safe there either: turns out she's the heir of the Nahid - the family who were brutally deposed by the current rulers of Daevabad - and Nahri finds herself smack in the middle of a simmering cauldron of political and religious unrest, which her arrival may cause to boil over at any moment. It was strange but refreshing to read a book without a single white character. I would have these pictures in my mind of what they looked like and would almost stumble over a description that reminded me the prince was supposed to be Eritrean. While the heart of the plot is about diversity and how people from vastly different cultural and religious backgrounds learn to live together, there isn't a single white person. Arabs, Indian, Chinese, African...there is a host of different cultures represented in the fantastical djinn city, but not a single one of them is white. I really enjoyed the fact that Chakraborty didn't feel the need to Westernise the setting much, or to Christianise the religions that play a central role in the characters' lives, if not the storyline. I know I'm speaking from a fairly ignorant white Western background, but this novel didn't feel like an 'exotic Middle Eastern' tale. It was a very well-crafted fantasy, set in the Middle East and rooted in the traditions and folklore of that part of the world. I would definitely recommend, and I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Empire of Gold in September. Tags
Summer holidays have begun for all my fellow teachers and, with lockdown easing significantly and international travel opening up again, I can only imagine many others will be taking their summer vacation time very soon as well. If a proper vacation isn't on the horizon for you this summer, then I hope you can take some time to lose yourself in a good book and some sunshine this month. With that in mind, here are a handful of my top recommendations for summer reads this year, and a few titles that are on my must-read list.
The Silence of the Girls
Rivers of London
Circe
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
My Summer Must-Reads
Not having read any of these yet, I won't write anything myself about them but instead I'll link the covers to the blurb or review that caught my eye. I'd also love to know how you all find new books to read. I have to admit I rely almost exclusively on browsing the covers and titles in my local Waterstones for anything that looks intriguing, but it means I miss out on a lot. Let me know in the comments below of any great reads you want to share!
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I'm a bit late to the party, but have finally latched onto the fairytale redux that seems to be sweeping fantasy bookshelves everywhere the past couple of years. For the most part I have thoroughly enjoyed this trend - Naomi Novik's Uprooted and Spinning Silver, for example, and of course Katherine Arden's pair that hooked me in the first place: The Bear and the Nightingale and The Girl in the Tower. Not that reinventing fairytales is anything new, mind you. Angela Carter wrote The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories in the late seventies, and countless fantasy authors have drawn on fairytale tropes and narratives to create their own stories (Patrick Rothfuss, Tolkien, Ceclia Dart-Thornton, to name a few - and that's not even touching on YA authors).
The Girl in Red is not even Christina Henry's first reimagining. She also wrote a new Alice in Wonderland, The Little Mermaid, and Peter Pan, all of which I have contemplated buying at Waterstones at one point or another, though now I don't think I'm going to bother, having read The Girl in Red. The novel centres around Red (Cordelia) who is hiking solo through the forest to get to her grandmother's self-sufficient and isolated cabin in the woods during the horrific pandemic of a deadly disease. No zombies, but there are chest-bursting, man-eating leeches (which really pushes my suspension of disbelief). The character would be likeable enough, but for a twenty-two year old, she acts remarkably like a sixteen year-old, which I found grating. What I also found grating was how self-consciously meta the novel tried to be. It indulges a little too often in the character's acknowledgement that all the sci-fi horror films she used to watch are now her reality, and she is determined not to fall into a stereotype. The way Henry constantly reminds you of the genre tropes she's using makes the novel feel derivative. I'm almost tempted to give the writer the benefit of the doubt and say she seems to be mocking the genre, but even if that's what she is doing, it's not very good. I did read the full novel because I was interested enough to see where it was going. The answer, much to my dismay, was nowhere. There didn't seem to be an overarching direction beyond 'get to grandmother's house' and that fell monumentally flat when Henry just gives up on writing that particular storyline, jumping ahead 25 days and wrapping the whole thing up with something akin to 'and they lived happily ever after'. Except this 'happily ever after' didn't even come after they'd vanquished the evil witch or slain the dragon, making it thoroughly unsatisfying. All in all, the story and characters felt forced and uncomfortable, and the narrative style itself was clumsy (it felt like she didn't quite know how to use a flashback) and uninspired. I would not recommend this. If you want a fairytale redux, go for Uprooted or The Bear and the Nightingale instead. If you want a horror survivalist story, pick up The Girl With All the Gifts. tags
I have had this book on my kindle for a few years now, sitting in my library gathering digital dust, as I re-read other things and generally ignore it's quirky, lengthy title. It wasn't until the film came out in 2018 that I finally became acquainted with the story. I watched the film first and thoroughly enjoyed the humour and the warmth of it and it was only a few weeks later that I remembered I actually had a copy to read.
Set immediately after WWII, the story centres on the young writer Juliet Ashton who stumbles across the eclectic mix of people who make up the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society - a book club invented on the spot in a desperate attempt at a cover story for the German patrol they encounter late one night. Juliet is particularly fascinated by the figure of Elizabeth, the founder of the society and who was sent overseas to a German internment camp during the war. While the absent Elizabeth may form the orbital centre for this group of characters, the novel is very much about friendships and love and, of course, the power that books and literature have to carry us through incredibly challenging times in our lives. One of my favourite moments from the novel is when the character Eben Ramsey is talking about his unexpected love of Shakespeare: "Do you know what sentence of his I admire the most? It is, 'The bright day is done, and we are for the dark.' I wish I'd known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, planeload after planeload of them...All I could think of was, Damn them, damn them, over and over again. If I could have thought the words, 'The bright day is done, and we are for the dark', I'd have been consoled somehow and ready to go out and contend with circumstance…" The book is a delight to read, though at times it seemed a bit twee (probably one of my favourite British words, though I only recently learned what it actually meant). Shaffer's novel embodies that Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife mood to historical fiction where the past is an idyllic retreat from the present, populated very nice people - polite, welcoming, and possessing of a gentle community spirit that the cynic in me doubts ever existed outside of fiction. The novel is very pastoral in tone: Juliet leaves the busy, broken hub of London (and her glamorous, ambitious fiancé) and finds her way to an isolated, rural island where she finds the real love and community that was lacking in the industrial, flashy London. It was a lovely, heartwarming read, if a bit overly 'nice', that only took me a few days to finish. Having seen the film first, and enjoyed the narrative style there, I was surprised to find that the novel was written as a series of letters. It worked beautifully for the first part, where Juliet is on tour around England, promoting her new book. She corresponds through letters to her friend and agent, as well as with Dawsey and the other members of the Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. For the second part of the novel the epistolary form feels much more forced. Juliet has moved to Guernsey by that point and I think a more traditional narrative would have suited this section much better. There would be a much greater depth of character development and it would allow the relationships to unfold in a more natural way. I thought you lost a lot of the solidity of the characters Juliet meets and also lost some of the strength of the relationships they were building because it was being told through such a restrictive view and form. Still, it was beautifully written and I think it's a perfect vacation read, if anyone is looking for something to take along on their holidays. Tags
The thing about being an English literature teacher is that you end up reading things that you would never have picked up for yourself. Sometimes you really enjoy them and other times you think, 'what a horribly dull read'. The glorious thing about working in an independent school is that if I read something that's horribly dull, I don't actually have to teach it! It's one of the main reasons I love working in the independent sector. This is not a post about teaching though so enough of that: on to my review of Duffy's poetry collection, Feminine Gospels.
I'm in two minds about Duffy's writing. I'm not sure I enjoy how overt her feminist messages are. Don't get me wrong, I am all for women's equality and raising awareness about how society often denies women a voice or agency, but Duffy's writing feels a bit masochistically self-indulgent. In Feminine Gospels she writes about suffering without offering any kind of solution or salvation. You could argue that it's a realistic depiction of women's unfortunate 'truth' in society, but I am not convinced. She writes about women who achieve freedom and success, but they are left isolated and broken by the end which is depressing and so utterly hopeless. Her poems all seem to say that we suffer when we're meek and stay in our expected places, but we also suffer when we make noise and push and break out of the hierarchy and become powerful. She seems to say that the condition of women is to suffer, regardless of our position in society. It got to the point where I found myself rolling my eyes and sighing a bit as I worked my way through her last few poems, particularly 'The Laughter at Stafford Girls High'. Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed Duffy's command of language. Poetry offers so much scope to play with language in a way that you can't always get away with in prose, and Duffy is a master at it. She understands words and people's interpretations of them so well that her lines are filled with layers of meaning, the intentional meaning often becoming very ambiguous. She is playful in the way she mixes sounds and ideas, tumbling them together in a playful, lighthearted way that is often entirely at odds with the message of suffering and isolation and misery in her poems. There's probably something profound that could be inferred from that juxtaposition, but I might leave that up to my year 13s to figure out in September. Overall, I haven't made up my mind on whether I enjoy Duffy or not. I certainly admire the way she plays with language, but I'm not sure I like her content enough to pick up another collection. From a teaching point of view though, it's going to be fun to tackle her poetry with my students. I thinks she might drive them a little mad with her ambiguity, but they will enjoy the challenge (and how easily the themes can be identified to, once you get your feet wet). tags
In my first year of holidays and travel here in England I came up with the brilliant idea of using books as souvenirs. I would find a novel that captured the essence of the place I had visited, some book that really brought the city or country alive for me. I bought Under the Tuscan Sun shortly after I visited Italy, and read The Book Thief when I visited Germany. It was a short-lived habit, mainly because it's surprisingly difficult to find a book that captures your experience of a city so completely at a convenient time for your to associate it closely with that place. Just before I gave up the pattern, I decided to find something that encapsulated London. This novel is it.
Rivers of London tells the story of Peter Grant, an ambitious, mouthy constable with the metropolitan police. His plans to become a detective are slightly rerouted when he unintentionally questions a ghost as a key witness in a murder scene and gets sucked into the poorly regarded magical crimes unit, required to undertake an apprenticeship as a practitioner to avoid frying his brain. Peter's frank observations about people and society work are both hilarious and depressingly cynical - about as London a perspective as you can get. But this novel does more than just capture the perspective and attitude of a Londoner: it also captures the dynamic nature of the city's physical shape as well. The many rivers and canals in London quite literally come alive, and the buildings, parks, squares, and Burroughs take on a personality of their own. When you move around London with Peter Grant, Aaronovitch manages to capture the complexities of London's multi-cultural make-up, its history, and the sheer diversity of people and ideas that come through this hectic capital. Talking of history: Aaronovitch artfully recreates the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) layering of history that is so very visible in London's architecture and geography. The ghosts and various magical phenomena in the story play a big part in bringing this history to the surface, but Aaronovitch also masters the art of exposition: when Peter Grant is telling you about the history of a place, it doesn't feel overdone or out of place. This novel is quite unlike any fantasy I've read before; it's what might happen if you put Sherlock Holmes, Poirot and Doctor Who into a blender, threw in a dash of Harry Potter, and topped it all off with a generous glug of gin. Though decidedly less middle-class. If you love the city of London (or detective fiction, or modern fantasy) then I suggest you find yourself a copy of Rivers of London for your next read. [In North America it was published under the title Midnight Riot.] Tags
I recommended A Closed and Common Orbit to a friend a few weeks ago. She was looking for something a little different and, as someone who isn't really a fan of science fiction, I thought this would be a little taste of the genre without overwhelming her with your standard sci-fi tropes. I'm not sure if she's picked it up yet, but it got me thinking a lot more about the novel and how I felt about it.
Initially, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It was warm and friendly, with the comforting knowledge that the characters were all going to be okay by the end. It was an easy read, lacking in real plot or character complexity and hardly groundbreaking in terms of considering the future of the human race. Nina Allan wrote a review for this book on the back of it being nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Science Fiction Award. In her opinion, this novel did not deserve the nomination, as it's too comfortable and too easy. Her review is titled 'To Boldly Go?' and her main point is that the novel lacks any of the speculative imagination that characterises science fiction. I have to agree with Allan there, as one of the main reasons I liked this book was that it reminded me so strongly of Firefly in terms of the universe and character types. Immediately this demonstrates rather a lack of originality, though I would argue that Chambers' writing is less about the world the characters live in and more about their relationships. That being said, she does tend to oversimplify the interactions between characters as well. There's a shallowness to the characters' abilities to just get over arguments and completely let go that doesn't feel realistic; what all this means is that while the novel seems to explore the idea of humanity and where we all might fit into the grander universe, it does so with very broad strokes, leaving the messages often feeling very superficial. There isn't any consideration at all over where our current direction will lead us as a member of the universe rather than just this planet. That being said, I also take issue with the idea that science fiction has to be about self-destruction and hopelessness. I think we can all agree that the human race is not a particularly gentle, considerate, balanced species, but I do find science fiction can often dwell on our horrors and mistakes without emphasising the capacity for kindness and community we are also capable of. This is where Chambers actually shines for me: she suggests that, no matter how crazy the rest of the universe might get, you can still create a pocket of acceptance and friendship that allows you to support each other. There is always room and time to prioritise love and friendship, and if we were all a little more capable of trust then we could just let go and be our best selves. Unfortunately I don't think Chambers trusts her readers to be able to find those messages for themselves and has fallen into the trap of exposition, which immediately makes these optimistic concepts trite rather than profound. I enjoyed this novel when I read it; it was relaxing and it was easy, but that easiness also means I probably won't pick it up again for many years. I like books that make me think, that force me to make connections and ask questions. This story is heart-warming and full of a naive kind of hope and optimism, but beyond being an excellent recovery read after an emotionally draining couple of months, I don't think there's much more to say on this one. tags |
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