Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell Trilogy, #1)
Wolf Hall is a pretty dense historical fiction about Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII. But it’s an incredible accomplishment of a book, and I’m really glad I read it.
Author: Hilary Mantel
Publisher: Henry Holt (original US edition, in 2009)
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Tudor England. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is charged with securing his divorce. Into this atmosphere of distrust comes Thomas Cromwell — a man as ruthlessly ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.
TL;DR Review
Wolf Hall is a pretty dense historical fiction about Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII. But it’s an incredible accomplishment of a book, and I’m really glad I read it.
For you if: You like historical fiction, you’re interested in the period of history of Henry VIII, or you’re just looking for a good old-fashioned literary challenge.
Full Review
Alright, so I’m not going to try to tell you whether this book is “good” or not — its critical acclaim and list of prizes (including the Booker) can tell you that. I'm just here to report on the experience of reading its 650 pages.
I do have to say, I’m proud to now be A Person Who’s Read Wolf Hall, lol. I finally picked it up because the third book of the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, is shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize.
Wolf Hall is an epic historical fiction novel about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, and Anne Boleyn. Cromwell, son of a lowly Blacksmith, rose to prominence and figured out how to make the king the head of the church in England (instead of the Pope) so that the king could divorce his wife and marry Anne.
It’s a giant book packed with research, and it isn't an “easy” read. The style sort of reminded me of a dense classic like Les Miserables. This book demands to be read slowly, urges you to take notes, requires you check the cast of characters over and over again (um, everyone back then was named Thomas or Catherine or Anne??), and pairs well with an online study guide (I used Course Hero). But still, the characters do truly come to life on the page, and I always wanted to know what would happen next. I also found that listening along with the library audiobook (at a fast speed, of course) while I read my print copy really helped me relax into the writing and kept me moving forward through the book.
Things to know before you read this: Mantel almost never uses Cromwell’s name, despite the book being written in third person. She uses “he” almost exclusively, which can get confusing when he’s in a scene with other men (which obviously happens often). I’ve read that this was meant to make you identify with him more, but it did take some getting used to. I got used to it, though, and by the end it barely ever tripped me up.
History was never my favorite subject in school, and I don’t read much genre historical fiction. I also knew almost nothing about this period of history. If I had been previously interested in it or if I were familiar with other books/plays/etc about Henry VIII, then I think I would have really, really loved this book. Still, I did like it, and I’m really glad I read it! On to Bring Up the Bodies!
Trigger Warnings
Child abuse
Pregnancy, miscarriages, and childbirth
Sexual assault (mentioned)
Domestic abuse (mentioned)
We Need to Talk About Kevin
We Need to Talk About Kevin is a deeply unsettling but ultimately brilliant book about the mother of a psychopathic kid who commits a school shooting.
Author: Lionel Shriver
Publisher: Counterpoint (originally, in 2003 — the edition shown above is Harper Perennial)
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
The gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry.
Eva never really wanted to be a mother - and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.
TL;DR Review
We Need to Talk About Kevin is a deeply unsettling but ultimately brilliant book about the mother of a psychopathic kid who commits a school shooting.
For you if: You can read difficult but important books.
Full Review
We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Women's Prize in 2005, so was next up for me in the #ReadingWomen challenge to read all the previous winners this year.
Mid-review important trigger warning: School shootings
This book is narrated by a woman named Eva as she writes letters to her former husband, giving her full account of the years leading up to the day their son murdered nine classmates and a teacher. Kevin showed psychopathic tendencies from infancy, especially to his mother — but over and over again, Eva was not believed. Trapped between the expectations of what it means to be a mother, a parent's perceived responsibility for a child's actions, and a terrorizing son, she was damned if she did, damned if she didn't. Until one day, it was too late.
This book is ... deeply unsettling, and often difficult to read. But it's also an undeniably brilliant feat. Beyond just depicting Kevin's chilling nature and behaviors (this kid is CREEPY), you also find yourself wavering between believing Eva and not, and then feeling guilty for it. Even readers can't pull ourselves out of our expectations of her as his mother, the gut reaction that she's partly to blame although of course she isn't at all. I am going to be thinking about this for a really long time.
The writing — Eva's voice — feels a little stiff at first, but stick with her. I actually found that it lent itself really well to being spoken rather than read, and I did large swaths of this on audiobook. It was very well done. Sometimes I even listened (fast) while I read along in print.
This one really shook me, and if you think you're up for something uncomfortable but important, I recommend it.
Trigger Warnings
School shootings
Described allegations of sexual assault
Pregnancy and childbirth
Racial slurs and homophobic remarks
Lake Life
Author: David James Poissant
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
From the award-winning author of the acclaimed story collection The Heaven of Animals, called “a wise debut…beautiful [stories] with a rogue touch” (The New York Times Book Review), comes a sweeping, domestic novel about a family that reunites at their North Carolina lake house for one last vacation before the home is sold — and the long-buried secrets that are finally revealed.
The Starling family is scattered across the country. Parents Richard and Lisa live in Ithaca, New York, and work at Cornell University. Their son Michael, a salesperson, lives in Dallas with his elementary school teacher wife, Diane. Michael’s brother, Thad, an aspiring poet, makes his home in New York City with his famous painter boyfriend, Jake. For years they’ve traveled to North Carolina to share a summer vacation at the family lake house.
That tradition is coming to an end, as Richard and Lisa have decided to sell the treasured summer home and retire to Florida. Before they do, the family will spend one last weekend at the lake. But what should to be a joyous farewell takes a nightmarish turn when the family witnesses a tragedy that triggers a series of dramatic revelations among the Starlings—alcoholism, infidelity, pregnancy, and a secret the parents have kept from their sons for over thirty years. As the weekend unfolds, relationships fray, bonds are tested, and the Starlings are forced to reckon with who they are and what they want from this life.
Set in today’s America, Lake Life is a beautifully rendered, emotionally compelling novel in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth.
TL;DR Review
Lake Life is a fast-paced, character-driven family drama that tackles heavy themes and yet still feels right as a summer read.
For you if: You like family dramas.
Full Review
Big thanks to Simon & Schuster for sending me an advanced copy of this book for review!
I don’t usually read very many books that you’d see billed as a “beach read.” (I like to be left sobbing on the floor, thank you very much.) And while Lake Life isn’t *quite* what I’d call a beach read, it still felt like a good choice for a hot, lazy summer weekend. This family drama is fast-paced, juicy, can’t-look-away, sooooo many secrets coming to light. But it also addresses some heavy, real-life stuff (see trigger warnings) that makes it feel like anything but fluff.
The story is about a family — a set of older parents, two adult sons, and the sons’ partners — as they all gather at the family’s summer home for one last vacation. At the end of the week, the parents are selling it in preparation for their retirement to Florida. But right as they’re settling in for the trip, they see something terrible happen, and it shakes up everyone’s emotions enough that a plethora of closely held secrets can’t help but come out.
This book really is a classic family drama. Each character in the book is vivid and distinct, and by the end, you’ll have come to root for (and also kind of hate) all of them. Poissant drops them into a setting where they can’t get away, prods them around, dials up the stakes, flames the tension, and lets it explode. We, the readers, can’t help but watch as all these pieces fly into the air, so curious as to when and how they will land.
Ultimately, this book is about parenthood, marriage, family, grief, the nature of family secrets, and how we care for ourselves and those we love best. I especially recommend it if you’re usually a literary fiction reader but looking for something faster-paced than your norm.
Trigger Warnings
Death of a child — drowning
Alcoholism
Suicidal ideation, memory of attempts
Pregnancy, miscarriage scare
Death of an infant — SIDS/suffocation
Infidelity
Sabrina & Corina: Stories
Sabrina & Corina is a collection of really, really good short stories about Latinas of indigenous ancestry. There wasn’t a single one I didn’t enjoy, and many I truly loved.
Author: Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Publisher: One World
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection — a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Indigenous Latina characters and the land they inhabit. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado — a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite — these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.
In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.
Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.
TL;DR Review
Sabrina & Corina is a collection of really, really good short stories about Latinas of indigenous ancestry. There wasn’t a single one I didn’t enjoy, and many I truly loved.
For you if: You like short stories and / or character- and human-driven plots.
Full Review
Sabrina & Corina is one of the best short story collections I’ve read. But don’t take my word for it: It was shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction.
Each story is about a woman who is Latina and indigenous. They take place in the American West, many in the present day, but some in different periods of history as well. I think what makes them all so good is that each one has a unique spark — an impression, a lesson, a meaning — that shines through, but they also all feel connected, like I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the women from each story were related to one another.
I ended up listening to the audiobook while I was riding in the car on a road trip, and after every story I’d pull out Evernote to jot down my emotions and takeaways so that I could transfer them to my reading journal later. Also, each story is read by a different narrator, and it was very well done.
I think my favorite stores were the title story “Sabrina & Corina” (just wow), “Sisters” (what an incredible feat of understated tension and suspense), and “Tomi” (my heart!). But really, they all spoke to me in some way, and there isn’t one I didn’t truly enjoy.
Trigger Warnings
Sexual assault
Domestic abuse
Relationship abuse, physical abuse
Pregnancy, abortion
The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)
The Obelisk Gate is a fantastic sequel to The Fifth Season that promises SO MUCH to come.
Author: N.K. Jemisin
Publisher: Orbit
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
***Description is spoiler for The Fifth Season***
This is the way the world ends... for the last time.
The season of endings grows darker as civilization fades into the long cold night. Alabaster Tenring – madman, world-crusher, savior – has returned with a mission: to train his successor, Essun, and thus seal the fate of the Stillness forever.
It continues with a lost daughter, found by the enemy.
It continues with the obelisks, and an ancient mystery converging on answers at last.
The Stillness is the wall which stands against the flow of tradition, the spark of hope long buried under the thickening ashfall. And it will not be broken.
TL;DR Review
The Obelisk Gate is a fantastic sequel to The Fifth Season that promises SO MUCH to come.
For you if: You read The Fifth Season. (…Read The Fifth Season.)
Full Review
***Is spoiler for The Fifth Season***
I’ll keep this pretty short, since The Obelisk Gate is the second book in a trilogy. But if you loved The Fifth Season, you’ll also love this one, and you simply MUST continue. This one reveals so much more about the world and conflict, introduces a new FIRE character, and promises sooooo much to us for book 3.
N.K. Jemisin is such a master world-builder. And though I’ve learned that these books are technically sci-fi, it’s “soft” sci-fi, and they blend in magic and de-center humans in a way that feels true to fantasy. She really knows how to break your heart and make you hope and teach you important things along the way.
On to The Stone Sky!
Trigger Warnings
Child abuse
Grief over the death of a child
Racism and racial slurs
Small Island
Author: Andrea Levy
Publisher: Picador
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Small Island is an international bestseller. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction, The Orange Prize for Fiction: Best of the Best, The Whitbread Novel Award, The Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It has now been adapted for the screen as a coproduction of the BBC and Masterpiece/WGBH Boston.
Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie, raised as a farmer's daughter, befriends Gilbert, and later Hortense, with innocence and courage, until the unexpected arrival of her husband, Bernard, who returns from combat with issues of his own to resolve.
Told in these four voices, Small Island is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, of crossings taken and passages lost, of shattering compassion and of reckless optimism in the face of insurmountable barriers — in short, an encapsulation of that most American of experiences: the immigrant's life.
TL;DR Review
Small Island is a fantastic historical novel about pride, connection, racism, and humans’ shared humanity.
For you if: You like literary historical fiction that tackles important themes.
Full Review
I read Small Island because it won the Women’s Prize in 2004, so it was next up for me in the #ReadingWomen challenge. I’d never heard of it and so probably wouldn’t have found it on my own, but I’m really, really glad I did.
“Present day” in this story is just after WWII has ended, and it features four main characters: Hortense and Gilbert, who have come to live in England from Jamaica, and Queenie and Bernard, who own the home Hortense and Gilbert rent a room in. But the story flashes backward into each of these characters’ histories, one by one, to show you how they came to be who they are and how they came to be in the place they are now.
At least here in the United States, WWII feels like a time of heroism — when the world came together to defeat Naziism and the idea of the “master race.” But we so rarely consider that all this happened before the Civil Rights movement, and that anti-Black racism was in full force. Jim Crow was alive and well. What I didn’t know before reading this was that Americans brought segregation to Europe with them, demanded it no matter where they went. And that anti-Black racism in England was also fierce and strong.
This book feels like what novels are meant to be. A sweeping story that tangles up your heart and reveals truths about living in this world, with other people, in a way that deepens our understanding. Each and every one of the characters is proud and flawed and a product of the world they live in. Ultimately, it’s about how easy it is to misunderstand one another when prejudice and racism get in the way. How easy it is to judge and then feel defensive when we ourselves fear or experience being judged.
Trigger Warnings
Racism and racial slurs
Pregnancy and childbirth
War and war violence
A Thousand Ships
A Thousand Ships is just so good. It’s easy to read and to love, but it also packs a big punch of metaphor and meaning.
Author: Natalie Haynes
Publisher: Mantle (UK)
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This book won’t be published in the US until January, but you preorder it from my Bookshop above, or you can buy the UK edition from a bookstore called Blackwell’s, which ships to the US for free!
Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
In A Thousand Ships, broadcaster and classicist Natalie Haynes retells the story of the Trojan War from an all-female perspective.
This was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them…
In the middle of the night, Creusa wakes to find her beloved Troy engulfed in flames. Ten seemingly endless years of brutal conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans are over, and the Greeks are victorious. Over the next few hours, the only life she has ever known will turn to ash . . .
The devastating consequences of the fall of Troy stretch from Mount Olympus to Mount Ida, from the citadel of Troy to the distant Greek islands, and across oceans and sky in between. These are the stories of the women embroiled in that legendary war and its terrible aftermath, as well as the feud and the fatal decisions that started it all…
Powerfully told from an all-female perspective, A Thousand Ships gives voices to the women, girls and goddesses who, for so long, have been silent.
TL;DR Review
A Thousand Ships is just so good. It’s easy to read and to love, but it also packs a big punch of metaphor and meaning.
For you if: You like greek retellings, especially The Silence of the Girls or The Song of Achilles or Circe.
Full Review
OK, so wow.
This book isn’t published in the US, but it fell on my radar because it’s shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize. Then I heard that it’s a retelling of the Trojan War from the women’s perspectives, and I knew I had to read it ASAP. I ordered a copy from Blackwell’s in the UK, which ships to the US for free, and never looked back.
I loved The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, so I felt pretty sure I was going to love this one. I wasn’t sure how they were going to be too different. But I quickly realized that it’s a question of scope — whereas Barker’s novel is primarily Briseis’s story, A Thousand Ships is dozens of women's stories. It’s a chorus of voices — mortal and goddess, ranging from a Trojan official’s wife; to Hecabe, queen of Troy; to Thetis, Achilles’s immortal mother; to Gaia, the earth herself.
Throughout, short chapters reveal that these stories are being sung by Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, to a poet who hopes to compose the next great epic. She makes it her business to show him that the well-known heroes of the Trojan war are by far the only heroes. That it may be less pleasant to linger on the devastating women’s stories that did indeed exist, that these men did indeed cause — but that’s the point, because those women’s stories are important and no less heroic and worthy of being sung.
“Is Oenone less of a hero than Menalaus? He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans, and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of these is the more heroic act?”
Natalie Haynes writes strong, emotional, echoing voices and characters. Reading this felt like sinking into a sort of home; exactly my kind of book, but one that accomplishes so much. You’ll turn the last page left with such a poignant sense that war and hubris and power leaves no true victors; that men buffet around women just as the gods buffet around men; that these stories are so incredibly linked, these characters intertwined.
I loved contemplating the question of who even caused the Trojan war? Was it Helen, who left her husband? Paris, who wooed her away? Hecabe, who could not kill a baby prophesied to doom them all? Aphrodite? Eris? Themis? Zeus? Gaia? Humans themselves?? Actions lead to reactions and it never ever ends.
Trigger Warnings
Sexual assault
Rape
Death of a child/baby (and husbands, and fathers, and…)
Suicide
Lanny
Lanny was exactly my kind of literary magical realism — visceral, full-bodied, whimsical, a little weird, and deeply resonant.
Author: Max Porter
Publisher: Graywolf Press
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
There’s a village sixty miles outside London. It’s no different from many other villages in England: one pub, one church, red-brick cottages, council cottages and a few bigger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might do anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs.
This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England’s mysterious past and its confounding present. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a figure schoolchildren used to draw green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth.
Dead Papa Toothwort is awake. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to his English symphony. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, enchanting boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.
TL;DR Review
Lanny was exactly my kind of literary magical realism — visceral, full-bodied, whimsical, a little weird, and deeply resonant.
For you if: You are looking to read something really creative and affecting.
Full Review
“Dead Papa Toothwort wakes from his standing nap a mile wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter. He lies down to hear hymns of the earth (there are none, so he hums), then he shrinks, cuts himself a mouth with a rusted ring pull and sucks up a wet skin of acid-rich mulch and fruity detritivores.”
“Dead Papa Toothwort chews the noise of the place and waits for his favorite taste, but he hasn’t gotten to it yet, and then he hears it, clear and true, the lovely sound of his favorite. The boy.”
I read Lanny because it was on the 2019 Booker Prize longlist, but I’m upset that I waited so long — this is exactly my kind of book. It will put you in your whole body and yank your heart and grip your gut. Also, it’s magical realism, which is always my jam.
The book is ultimately about a little boy named Lanny, who is quirky and smart and kind but definitely a little weird. There are three narrators: his mom, his dad, and an older neighbor who becomes a close family friend. Meanwhile, we also get occasional bursts of perspective from Dead Papa Toothwort, who is a local legend, a shapeshifting creature most believe to be myth, described to kids to keep them from misbehaving. Throughout, Dead Papa Toothwort watches Lanny, as he reminds him of himself in certain ways. All is reasonably well in these characters’ world, until suddenly Lanny goes missing.
I listened to this one’s audiobook and also flipped through the print version. Both are incredible. The print version plays with type in an incredibly creative way, and the audiobook is narrated by a cast that brings the whole story to life in a really magical, gripping way. It’s not long — only about 200 pages, but it packs a big punch.
What really struck me about this novel was how physical it was. How viscerally I was in the heads and bodies and world of these characters. The second section of the book, when Lanny goes missing, is particularly affecting and gut-wrenching and terrible and beautiful. And then the ending is fast-paced and exciting and will have you either listening intently or flipping pages faster and faster and faster.
I would have put this one on the shortlist, I think.
Trigger Warnings
Missing child
The Man Who Saw Everything
The Man Who Saw Everything is so creative. You’ll spend most of the book feeling lost … but you’re actually supposed to, and it pays off in the end.
Author: Deborah Levy
Publisher: Bloomsbury
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Cover Description
An electrifying novel about beauty, envy, and carelessness from Deborah Levy, author of the Booker Prize finalists Hot Milk and Swimming Home.
It is 1988 and Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian, has been invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic. As a gift for his translator's sister, a Beatles fanatic who will be his host, Saul's girlfriend will shoot a photograph of him standing in the crosswalk on Abbey Road, an homage to the famous album cover. As he waits for her to arrive, he is grazed by an oncoming car, which changes the trajectory of his life.
The Man Who Saw Everything is about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others clearly. It greets the specters that come back to haunt old and new love, previous and current incarnations of Europe, conscious and unconscious transgressions, and real and imagined betrayals, while investigating the cyclic nature of history and its reinvention by people in power. Here, Levy traverses the vast reaches of the human imagination while artfully blurring sexual and political binaries-feminine and masculine, East and West, past and present — to reveal the full spectrum of our world.
TL;DR Review
The Man Who Saw Everything is so creative. You’ll spend most of the book feeling lost … but you’re actually supposed to, and it pays off in the end.
For you if: You are willing to be patient and trust the author with a very cerebral reading experience.
Full Review
“What was the rest of it? To live without fear. No, that was impossible. To live with less fear, I whispered to Luna. To live with more hope. To not be hopeless all the time. I didn’t know where all the tears were coming from. Life is shocking.”
The Man Who Saw Everything was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, and it fits right in with that crowd: Cerebral, quite literary, tackling big questions in poetic ways. If you tend to like Booker nominees, you’ll probably like this one, too.
It’s about a young man named Saul Adler, who on the first page of the book is hit by a car while crossing Abbey Road. We follow him afterward and for a few months, as he heads off to East Germany (then the German Democratic Republic on that side of the Berlin Wall). All the while he’s grappling with his history with his father and brother and girlfriend, while in the GDR he’s (trying to) navigate the Stasi state and his interactions with his host family. But there are glimpses of strangeness throughout, and halfway through the book everything sort of flips upside down on its head.
If you read this book, be warned: A degree of trust is involved. You will spend most of it feeling confused and lost. But don’t worry, and don’t be hard on yourself — you are actually supposed to feel this way. The reason why will be slowly peeled back, layer by layer, throughout the second half of the book. It’s really impressive the way Deborah Levy accomplishes this, actually, and even though not everything is 110% crystal clear by the end, she also makes that feel wholly acceptable.
I also appreciated the evolution of our opinion of Saul Adler. In the beginning, you’re fully on his side; you have no reason not to be. But as you read, his shortcomings appear one by one, and by the end you realize that he is a very complicated character who has not always done the right thing by his loved ones.
And that is the lesson at the heart of this book: Our perception of ourselves is very different from the perceptions of others, and those differences shape our relationships. And the more honest we can get with what we are looking at in the mirror, the more we can bring our perception in line with others’ — the more honest we can be with ourselves — the better those relationships can be.
Trigger Warnings
None
Property
Property forces white women to take an uncomfortable look at their role in the history of slavery. It’s not exactly “fun” to read, but it is masterfully crafted and effective.
Author: Valerie Martin
Publisher: Doublday (original) / Vintage (trade paperback)
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Valerie Martin’s Property delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slavery’s venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress.
Exploring the permutations of Manon’s own obsession with Sarah against the backdrop of an impending slave rebellion, Property unfolds with the speed and menace of heat lightning, casting a startling light from the past upon the assumptions we still make about the powerful and powerful.
TL;DR Review
Property forces white women to take an uncomfortable look at their role in the history of slavery. It’s not exactly “fun” to read, but it is masterfully crafted and effective.
For you if: You want to read historical fiction that’s written to address racism, not merely portray it.
Full Review
“The sight of him was like a door slamming in my face. I even heard the catch of the latch, though perhaps it was only Sarah’s baby swallowing hard.”
Property won the Women’s Prize in 2003, so I read it as part of the #ReadingWomen challenge. I was initially suspicious of a book about slavery having been written by a white woman, but there’s a blurb of praise by Toni Morrison on the front cover, so I stayed open-minded.
It turns out that Property is a chillingly narrated, unflinching first-person look at the role white women played in the history of slavery, particularly the way they contributed to cruelty toward enslaved women. Valerie Martin says, “White women: We did this. Don’t look away.”
It’s written from the point of view of a woman named Manon, whose husband is the worst kind of cruel plantation owner. She hates him, but not because of the way he treats his slaves; because he shamed her by regularly “sleeping with” and having two children by Sarah, her maid. Meanwhile, during this book, slave rebellions brew nearby and a yellow fever epidemic threatens.
Manon is fully unlikeable. She’s quite terrible, in fact. She is entirely self-centered, and clearly doesn’t think of Sarah or the other slaves as human at all. She is annoyed — and allows it to confirm her view of them as inhuman — when slaves are unsympathetic to her discomfort or don’t say thank you, even though Manon herself never says the word please even once. She even envies them their “simple lives,” saying they just get to run and be brought back all at white people’s expense without a thought to how it impacts them, or how Sarah can slip inside when they arrive somewhere and be “spared” the obligation to greet people. And she has absolutely no idea why Sarah would still want to escape once Manon’s husband is no longer a threat.
Manon’s husband is terrible. And Manon absolutely has valid grievances against him for the way he treats her. But seeing the way he treats Sarah, filtered through Manon’s blind and unsympathetic eyes, we lose all sympathy for her.
All that doesn’t make this book “fun” to read, exactly, but the expertise of Valerie Martin’s craft and purpose can’t be denied. And that makes it entirely worth reading. Especially for white women. To reckon with our own blindness to intersectionality, to show how easy it is to dehumanize and deny others in order to attempt to bring forth our own grievances, and to admit the way we have historically used Black women as stepping stones for our own gain relative to white men.
Trigger Warnings
Rape and sexual violence
Graphic violence
Racism
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
The Empire of Gold (The Daevabad Trilogy, #3)
The Empire of Gold is the incredible conclusion to the Daevabad Trilogy that we’ve been waiting years for!
Author: S.A. Chakraborty
Publisher: Harper Voyager
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Cover Description
***Description is spoiler for The City of Brass and The Kingdom of Copper but my review below is NOT***
The final chapter in the bestselling, critically acclaimed Daevabad Trilogy, in which a con-woman and an idealistic djinn prince join forces to save a magical kingdom from a devastating civil war.
Daevabad has fallen.
After a brutal conquest stripped the city of its magic, Nahid leader Banu Manizheh and her resurrected commander, Dara, must try to repair their fraying alliance and stabilize a fractious, warring people.
But the bloodletting and loss of his beloved Nahri have unleashed the worst demons of Dara’s dark past. To vanquish them, he must face some ugly truths about his history and put himself at the mercy of those he once considered enemies.
Having narrowly escaped their murderous families and Daevabad’s deadly politics, Nahri and Ali, now safe in Cairo, face difficult choices of their own. While Nahri finds peace in the old rhythms and familiar comforts of her human home, she is haunted by the knowledge that the loved ones she left behind and the people who considered her a savior are at the mercy of a new tyrant. Ali, too, cannot help but look back, and is determined to return to rescue his city and the family that remains. Seeking support in his mother’s homeland, he discovers that his connection to the marid goes far deeper than expected and threatens not only his relationship with Nahri, but his very faith.
As peace grows more elusive and old players return, Nahri, Ali, and Dara come to understand that in order to remake the world, they may need to fight those they once loved . . . and take a stand for those they once hurt.
TL;DR Review
The Empire of Gold is the incredible conclusion to the Daevabad Trilogy that we’ve been waiting years for!
For you if: You loved The City of Brass and The Kingdom of Copper.
Full Review
Thank you, Harper Voyager, for providing me with an advanced electronic copy of this book!
I have love love LOVED the Daevabad Trilogy since I first read The City of Brass two years ago. The Kingdom of Copper solidified it as one of my favorite trilogies of all time, even before I’d read the conclusion. That’s how confident I was in this story’s promise, how much trust I had in S.A. Chakraborty’s skill. So I knew before I even started The Empire of Gold that I was going to love it.
And, of course, I did. Nearly 800 pages of action, new mythology, looong-awaited answers, and falling even deeper in love with these characters.
No spoilers, so here are my thoughts on the trilogy overall:
The story takes place in Egypt and across the Middle East and is set in the world of djinn, with characters that practice a religion modeled after Islam. (Just note re: author representation, S.A. Chakraborty is white and converted to Islam in her teens.)
It's got everything: a fierce female protagonist with mysterious beginnings, a swaggering legendary warrior, a smart and kind-hearted prince, a cunning larger-than-life king, a beautiful presentation of cultural mythology, and holy heck what a complex political situation.
That political situation and the moral complexity it comes with is the thing that makes this trilogy especially fantastic. By the middle of book two, you honestly have no idea which "side" of the conflict you're even rooting for anymore. No character or cultural group is fully good or bad. Nothing is black and white. Everyone is impacted by prejudices and built from their own form of trauma. You have no idea how this could ever end. I bow down to Chakraborty's ability to build a world like that; it's truly incredible.
Those who haven't read CoB yet: Get on it. Those anxiously awaiting EoG: You will not be disappointed.
Trigger Warnings
None
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
Bel Canto
Bel Canto is beautiful and devastating, and as you’d expect from the title, it flows like music. This might be my favorite Ann Patchett so far.
Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: Harper Perennial
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Somewhere in South America at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening, until a band of terrorists breaks in, taking the entire party hostage.
But what begins as a life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different. Friendship, compassion, and the chance for great love lead the characters to forget the real danger that has been set in motion and cannot be stopped.
Ann Patchett has written a novel that is as lyrical and profound as it is unforgettable. Bel Canto is a virtuoso performance by one of our best and most important writers.
TL;DR Review
Bel Canto is beautiful and devastating, and as you’d expect from the title, it flows like music. This might be my favorite Ann Patchett so far.
For you if: You like books written with language that sings and tugs at your heart.
Full Review
“There were worse reasons to keep a person hostage. You keep someone always for what he or she is worth to you, for what you can trade her for, money or freedom or somebody else you want more. Any person can be a kind of trading chip when you find a way to hold her. So to hold someone for song, because the thing longed for was the sound of her voice, wasn’t it all the same?”
I would have read Bel Canto someday no matter what, because it’s Ann Patchett and because everyone who reads it loves it. But it also won the Women’s Prize in 2002, which puts it on the #ReadingWomen list.
A group of people from all over the world are attending an intimate concert by a famous opera soprano, hosted at the home of this South American country's vice president. Terrorists crash the party and take them hostage, and as hours become days and then months of standoff, Patchett shows us exactly how universal humanity is; our cares, our fears, our talents, our value, our love. “Terrorists vs hostages” blurs and morphs and becomes a giant group of humans, together.
This book is tender and heartbreaking and incredibly beautiful. I particularly loved how Patchett so obviously measured and crafted each sentence to create the literal rhythm of music. At one point I stopped comprehending the words entirely as I focused on the length of each sentence, how the cadence lulls you. It’s truly an incredible example of craft.
I also really loved the decision to use Gen, the translator, as a central tenet to the story. If these people trapped in a house for months together had all spoken the same language, she never would have been able to expose their shared humanity in the same way. My heart broke for the terrorists, so many of whom were teenagers with minds and talents — language, chess, music — that had just never been allowed to flourish.
You know from the beginning — she tells you — that this book is not going to have a happy ending. And all you can do is let go and allow her to carry you toward its heartbreaking ending.
“‘It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.’”
Trigger Warnings
Hostage situation
Gun violence
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
How Much of These Hills Is Gold
This is a beautiful literary story about two Chinese-American siblings surviving on their own near the end of the gold rush. Like everyone else, I loved it.
Author: C Pam Zhang
Publisher: Riverhead
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
An electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape — trying not just to survive but to find a home.
Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.
Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it's about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.
TL;DR Review
How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a beautiful literary story about two Chinese-American siblings surviving on their own near the end of the gold rush. Like everyone else, I loved it.
For you if: You like to read books that encourage you to linger over every word.
Full Review
I’m not sure I have much to say about How Much of These Hills Is Gold that hasn’t already been said by readers and literary critics alike. But allow me to add my voice to the throng: This book is phenomenal.
It’s about two young Chinese-American siblings, Lucy and Sam, living out west at the end of the gold rush. At the beginning of the novel, their father has just died, and they’re forced to flee their home. They bring his body along and search for a place to bury him. The second part of the novel goes back in time, showing us the events leading up to the loss of their mother. The third part (my personal favorite) is narrated by the girls’ father and addressed to Lucy as his spirit tells the story of how he met their mother. And the last part takes place five years after the girls buried their father.
The book’s jacket description says, “On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it's about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.” I couldn’t have said this better myself.
C Pam Zhang is a language artist. Her writing is bold and sweeping and lyrical and takes no prisoners. She has such trust in her readers; she knows that you’re smart and you can handle it, and that you’ll either keep up or catch up in short order.
I also have a deep admiration for the care with which she treated Sam’s character, the pages and pages at the beginning where Sam’s gender was ambiguous, the love that is evident from Sam’s loved ones and even Zhang herself.
This book is quiet, declarative, magical, emotional. Read it.
Trigger Warnings
Death of a parent
Racism, xenophobia
Pregnancy, stillbirth
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
This is a beautiful novel. It shows us the most important moments of a murdered woman’s life, told through flashes of memory, in the minutes before her brain function stops.
Author: Elif Shafak
Publisher: Bloomsbury
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Our brains stay active for ten minutes after our heart stops beating. For Leila, each minute brings with it a new memory: growing up with her father and his wives in a grand old house in a quiet Turkish town; watching the women gossip and wax their legs while the men went to mosque; sneaking cigarettes and Western magazines on her way home from school; running away to Istanbul to escape an unwelcome marriage; falling in love with a student who seeks shelter from a riot in the brothel where she works. Most importantly, each memory reminds Leila of the five friends she met along the way — friends who are now desperately trying to find her …
TL;DR Review
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is a beautiful novel. It shows us the most important moments of a murdered woman’s life, told through flashes of memory, in the minutes before her brain function stops.
For you if: You like literary historical fiction and appreciate a creative narrative structure.
Full Review
“As far as she was concerned, the apocalypse was not the worst thing that could happen. The possibility of an immediate and wholesale decimation of civilization was not half as frightening as the simple realization that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on just the same with or without us. Now that, she had always thought, was terrifying.”
Shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is beautiful and striking, with a narrative structure that flows forward like a river; you can predict its shape by looking at the map, but not the beauty that will come along the way.
The novel is about Leila, a sex worker from Istanbul, who has just been murdered. Although her heart has stopped beating, her brain continues on, cycling through memory for 10 minutes and 38 seconds. Each passing minute brings us into a new memory, shaping her past — family, trauma, friendship, love. Along the way, we also meet her five closest friends. After the time is up and Laila’s mind goes finally quiet, the narrative shifts, and we see her friends mourning her as they attempt to lay her to rest in the way she deserves.
It wasn’t perfect, in my opinion, mostly because I thought the part of the book following her death was too long. I loved the minute-by-minute structure of the story, her flashbacks, and I expected the narration featuring her friends to feel like a coda. But instead, it sort of felt like part of another book altogether. It was at least a third of the story, and while I loved these characters when I saw them through Leila’s eyes, I didn’t feel like I knew them well enough to stay quite as hooked that long without her. But still, the very ending was especially beautiful, and I still really liked the book overall.
For most of the book, I found myself drawn into the story and subtly held, not even tempted to pick up my phone for a few minutes of scrolling between chapters. The writing throughout is quietly mournful. It’s capable of being read quickly without losing meaning, straightforward in the truth that it provides and resonant without being overly embellished.
We are built of memories, made of those who love us. What other beauty could there be?
Trigger Warnings
Miscarriage, pregnancy, birth
Pedophilia, childhood sexual assault/rape
Death of a child/sibling
Mental illness
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)
The Fifth Season is not just entertaining, it’s masterful. Between that and the unflinching racial allegory, it is not to be missed.
Author: N.K. Jemisin
Publisher: Orbit
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
This is the way the world ends. Again.
Three terrible things happen in a single day.
Essun, masquerading as an ordinary schoolteacher in a quiet small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Mighty Sanze, the empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years, collapses as its greatest city is destroyed by a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heartland of the world's sole continent, a great red rift has been been torn which spews ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.
But this is the Stillness, a land long familiar with struggle, and where orogenes — those who wield the power of the earth as a weapon — are feared far more than the long cold night. Essun has remembered herself, and she will have her daughter back.
She does not care if the world falls apart around her. Essun will break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.
TL;DR Review
The Fifth Season is not just entertaining, it’s masterful. Between that and the unflinching racial allegory, it is not to be missed.
For you if: You have ever loved a fantasy book.
Full Review
“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at those contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they'll break themselves trying for what they'll never achieve.”
The Fifth Season has been on my mental list of books to read someday for a very long time. So when I saw that the Center for Fiction was offering a guided reading group on the Broken Earth trilogy, I was in. What a great decision that has turned out to be.
I honestly can’t believe I slept on this book for so long. It’s hard to understate how masterful it is — not just entertainment, but excellent, full-bodied craft. Jemisin builds this world carefully and precisely in a way that demands to be read slowly and contemplated deeply. The prologue alone is actually perfect. Every detail is intentional, and it builds an undeniable, unflinching allegory for racism and slavery.
The story opens on a character named Essun mourning the death of her toddler son, who was killed by his father for being an orogene (as is his mother, secretly). Orogenes — derogatory term rogga — have the ability to manipulate the earth and stone. The government in this world trains those who can be controlled, and kills those who can’t. At the same time, another orogene tears a rent in the earth itself at the empire’s capital, triggering the next Fifth Season — one that is sure to prove the end of the world.
I don’t think I can overstate how well done this is. Information is paced perfectly; you begin to suspect certain things just before they’re revealed. You are constantly intrigued by the unknown, hungry for backstory, eager for action. The characters are heartbreaking in how much they matter to you.
I tracked every chapter in my reading journal, summarizing what happened in a few sentences and noting down my questions and theories. (I highly recommend this.) I never lacked for things to say, not once after any of the chapters.
If you don’t want to take my word for it, consider: This book won the Hugo Award in 2016, and books 2 and 3 in the trilogy also won. Nobody else in the history of ever — man, woman, white, non-white — has done that before. Ever.
Trigger Warnings
Death of a child
Childhood emotional abuse
Racism and racial slurs
Attempting pregnancy
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
The Idea of Perfection
I fell so hard for The Idea of Perfection. The plot does move pretty slowly, but that’s because you’re busy falling in love with the characters and setting (and having your heart broken).
Author: Kate Grenville
Publisher: Picador (originally)
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This book may be out of print, because I couldn’t find it via Bookshop or Bookstore Link. However, you may be able to buy a used copy, as I did. Here’s more info about this book on IndieBound.
Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Harley Savage is a plain woman, a part-time museum curator and quilting expert with three failed marriages and a heart condition. Douglas Cheeseman is a shy, gawky engineer with jug-handle ears, one marriage gone sour, and a crippling lack of physical courage. They meet in the little Australian town of Karakarook, where Harley has arrived to help the town build a heritage museum and Douglas to demolish the quaint old Bent Bridge. From the beginning they are on a collision course until the unexpected sets them both free.
Elegantly and compassionately told, The Idea of Perfection is reminiscent of the work of Carol Shields and Annie Proulx and reveals Kate Grenville as “a writer of extraordinary talent” (The New York Times Book Review).
TL;DR Review
I fell so hard for The Idea of Perfection. The plot does move pretty slowly, but that’s because you’re spending the whole time falling in love with the characters and setting (and having your heart broken).
For you if: You read for characters over plot, or you’re interested in reading an example of amazing use of character and setting in writing.
Full Review
“But out here, she could see people went by different rules. You did not just pick out the best bits of life. You took the whole lot, the good and the bad. You forgave people for being who they were, and you hoped they would be able to forgive you. Now and again you were rewarded with the small pleasure of being able to laugh, not uproariously but genuinely, at a small witticism offered by someone who was usually a bore. More than heat and flies, that was what made the bush feel like another country, where anything was possible.”
Y’all. I fell hard for this book. A lot of people on Goodreads have given it four stars. If you had asked me 100 pages in, I probably would have guessed that’s where I was going to land, too. But Kate Grenville’s skill with character and setting is incredible, and the people she’s brought to life here are so, so real, with such real heartbreak, and she wrecked me. This book won the Women’s Prize in 2001, and I can see why.
This is a book about misfits, imperfect people who just want to be loved but are afraid to for fear of being hurt. The plot is simple: Harley Savage is a large, closed-off, no-frills woman who’s been sent to a small town in rural Australia to help them establish a small, local museum. Douglas Cheeseman is a big-eared, mustached, nervous engineer, and he was sent to oversee the demolish of a quirky but unstable bridge that many in the town would like to save. Meanwhile, a local woman named Felicity Porcelline, obsessive-compulsive about bodily perfection, harbors a strange fascination with the town butcher.
The plot of this book moves very slowly; it’s billed as “an amusing and moving story of unlikely love” and “a quirky, touching romance that celebrates something even better than perfection.” And yet Harley and Douglas don’t meet until 100 pages in, and they don’t have more than that initial conversation until nearly halfway through the book. This is why, at first, I thought it was going to be a four-star book for me. But then I realized that Grenville was doing something much different. She was breaking our hearts.
Because these characters. Grenville makes them so real, with such careful and surgically precise attention to the tiniest of moments. Then she will wallop you with something bigger. Many times during this novel I’d be reading along, and then one sentence would stab out so quickly and acutely that I had to close my eyes for a few moments while the emotion hit me. I cried, quite literally, near the end.
And yet if I pulled any of those sentences out for you, all their resonance would strip away. Grenville builds these characters and their heartbreak layer by layer by layer. She also brings the Australian countryside to life, vividly, and uses it masterfully to shape these people and their stories.
I will be bleeding from this one for a while, I think.
Trigger Warnings
Suicide
Survivor’s guilt
Racism (anti-Chinese)
You Exist Too Much
You Exist Too Much is an engaging story about a young Palestinian-American bisexual woman that raises all sorts of questions about depiction, family trauma, and mental health.
Author: Zaina Arafat
Publisher: Catapult
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Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop,* which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter.
Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East ― from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine ― Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as “love addiction.” In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.
Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings ― for love, and a place to call home.
TL;DR Review
You Exist Too Much is an engaging story about a young Palestinian-American bisexual woman that raises all sorts of questions about depiction, family trauma, and mental health.
For you if: You like character-driven novels where the characters grapple with tough challenges, particularly related to culture and queerness.
Full Review
Big thanks to Catapult for providing me with an early review copy of this book!
You Exist Too Much is a book that really got me thinking — about stereotypes, about complexity, about family and generational trauma, and about the way books can depict all those things.
The book is about a young Palestinian-American bisexual woman. She’s struggling to figure out how to bring the different pieces of her life together, as her mother will not be supportive of her queer lifestyle. Indeed, when she tries to tell her mother that her roommate is her long-term girlfriend, it’s a disaster. But her relationship with her girlfriend is also at risk.
As we will come to learn stems from deep-seated family trauma (“Good luck finding someone to love you like I did,” her mother hurls at her), the main character is notoriously unfaithful and treats romantic encounters like addicts treat drugs: as a distraction from reality, a way to feel something, a way to avoid dealing with her fears. She becomes obsessed with the version of a person she builds up in her mind and will destroy her own life against the rocks as she pursues them.
The story follows the main character as she seeks addiction therapy and begins the long journey of breaking her unhealthy compulsions and learning to build healthy relationships, with herself, with romantic partners, and maybe with her mother as well.
There is a lot about this book that I don’t have first-hand experience with — queerness, addiction treatment, family trauma, cultural disconnect — and so I can’t really speak to how well these were represented. That being said, here’s how they seemed to me, an outsider.
This is the first book I’ve ever read depicting queerness through a Palestinian-American lens, and that feels important. But it also brings up the question of whether this book harms bisexual people by playing into stereotypes about them being chronically unfaithful, throwing themselves at anyone and everyone. Personally, I felt like the author did this character justice, giving her a big, round enough background that it was clear her unhealthy behaviors were not because of her sexuality but because of the family trauma she’d experienced her whole life. That feels like a way to make space for stories that may be someone’s real truth, even if parts of them align with stereotypes.
I also find myself meditating on the question of how different this book would be if the main character had these unhealthy behaviors, but was straight. I think in many ways, one could tell this story that way, in that the triggers and backstory could plausibly cause it. And that is why it feels nuanced enough to move past the stereotypes. And yet also, you cannot change the fact that she’s bisexual without losing a sense of this book’s urgency and truth, because the character would not be her strong, rebellious, nuanced self without it. You would lose the half of the story that is not directly about her addiction.
I would really love to hear other people’s perspectives on this point in particular. As I said, I am an outsider to these experiences.
I do think that the way mental health and addiction treatment is depicted in this book felt like it was not as nuanced as it could be. But since her treatment is only the first half of the book and her recovery — which has so many bumps along the way — is the second, it seems like that may be because there was not a lot of space devoted to it,
Still, I think this book is absolutely worth your read, if only to spark you to contemplate these things, like it did for me.
Trigger Warnings
Addiction, substance abuse, alcoholism, and overdose
Eating disorders
Homophobia and familial non-acceptance
Infidelity
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The Wall
The Wall reads like a classic, with an unapologetic dystopian allegory, vivid setting, and memorable narrator. It’s gripping and gritty and hard to look away from.
Author: John Lanchester
Publisher: W. W. Norton
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Ravaged by the Change, an island nation in a time very like our own has built the Wall―an enormous concrete barrier around its entire coastline. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls who are trapped amid the rising seas outside and are a constant threat. Failure will result in death or a fate perhaps worse: being put to sea and made an Other himself. Beset by cold, loneliness, and fear, Kavanagh tries to fulfill his duties to his demanding Captain and Sergeant, even as he grows closer to his fellow Defenders. A dark part of him wonders whether it would be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if he had to fight for his life.
TL;DR Review
The Wall reads like a classic, with an unapologetic dystopian allegory, vivid setting, and memorable narrator. It’s gripping and gritty and hard to look away from.
For you if: You like a character-driven war story.
Full Review
It’s cold on the Wall. That’s the first thing everybody tells you, and the first thing you notice when you’re sent there, and it’s the thing you think about all the time you’re on it, and it’s the thing you remember when you’re not there anymore. It’s cold on the Wall.
I read The Wall because it was long-listed for the 2019 Booker Prize. It’s an unforgiving, unapologetic allegory focused on environmentalism and anti-immigration.
What’s interesting is that even though pieces of it were fast-paced and exciting, I wouldn’t call the book exciting overall — and yet it was also sort of un-putdownable. It reads, to me, like the kind of classic that gets taught in high schools. I understand why it didn’t win the Booker, but I can also completely understand why it merited nomination.
Kavanagh, our narrator, lives in a country that we can assume is meant to be England. The Wall rings the entire country’s perimeter and was built to keep Others out. That’s because years before, the Change reshaped the world: Beaches are something only seen in movies as coastlines everywhere have long since flooded, and warm climates are no longer habitable at all. Every citizen of this country does two years of military guard service on the Wall, armed and tasked with killing any Others who come in rowboats and attempt to cross the Wall. The story starts as Kavanagh begins his two years on the Wall.
Lanchester has no subtlety about his allegory here. Our world could become this world, and he wants you to know it. That isn’t the reason this book is good. Instead, what this book does so excellently is transport you onto the Wall itself and into Kavanagh’s shoes. You can feel the cold, you can feel the competing emotions of boredom and terror. Kavanagh’s world and experiences come alive. There were violent scenes that were really hard to read, too.
Kavanagh’s character arc also feels somewhat classic: naïveté and fear as he enters training and begins his service, anger and maturation during the meat of his time on the Wall, and then the wisdom of experience and a sort of heroism as we near the conclusion. Secondary characters had very little depth (I would have liked more on the woman named Hifa, personally), but that’s because we are so firmly inside Kavanagh’s head.
Ultimately, there is so much in this book about our collective need for light and warmth and community. It’s about humanity, and war, and fear, and hope, and warnings, and resilience.
Trigger Warnings
The violence of battle
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Weather
Weather is not so much a story as a series of linked vignettes that, together, give us a glimpse into Lizzie’s life. I liked it, but it won’t be for everyone.
Author: Jenny Offill
Publisher: Knopf
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
From the author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation — one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year — a shimmering tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis
Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience — but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks . . . And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in — funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.
TL;DR Review
Weather is not so much a story as a series of linked vignettes that, together, give us a glimpse into Lizzie’s life. I liked it, but it won’t be for everyone.
For you if: You have patience for and interest in books without plot; those written to examine humanity rather than to tell a story.
Full Review
I picked up Weather after seeing positive reviews from my friends who read a lot of literary fiction, and because it was shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize. I was even more intrigued when I read Jenny Offill’s bio and learned she teaches at Syracuse University, my home turf!
I should preface this by saying that in order to enjoy this book, you have to be okay with floating a little bit. There is almost no plot. Instead, the book is written in vignettes: snippets of things happening in the main character’s life, her observations about the world, anecdotes, etc. They jump around in time and don’t have a clear link, except that they are all from the main character. In that way, it’s pretty abstract and feels quite “literary.” Whether you like this book will depend on whether you like books like that.
The book’s narrator is named Lizzie. She’s a university librarian with a husband and a son, and a brother who’s a recovering addict. She’s also a friend of a woman named Sylvia who runs a famous podcast about environmentalism. The two main “events” of the book are that a) her brother has a baby and drops precipitously into a state of poor mental health, and b) Sylvia asks her to help with the podcast, primarily by answering letters of fans and skeptics.
All together, Lizzie’s vignettes form a unique and resonant commentary on the world today, including societal trends, parenthood, family ties, and more. But I can also understand that for those who read primarily for story (which is perfectly valid), this book might be frustrating.
I had read nearly half of it when I found myself unexpectedly stuck in the car one day, so I downloaded the audiobook version of this book from my library. It’s really short (200 pages), so that’s how I finished the book. And I found that the audiobook was actually really helpful — the voice narrator did a great job of bringing inflection and meaning into the vignettes, which helped to tie them together better than I could on my own. The resonated more, and I appreciated it more. It’s not a “casual” audiobook that you can listen to without fully concentrating — you definitely have to pay attention in order to really pick up on what the author is doing — which I know (from experience) can be hard. The car ride ended up being the perfect place for me to listen to it, but I might also suggest listening while walking or folding laundry.
Trigger Warnings
Drug addiction and abuse
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
A Burning
A Burning is an emotionally ravaging and poignant story about a young girl accused of terrorism. And it absolutely earns the hype it’s gotten.
Author: Megha Majumdar
Publisher: Knopf
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
For readers of Tommy Orange, Yaa Gyasi, and Jhumpa Lahiri, an electrifying debut novel about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise — to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies — and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India.
Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely — an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor — has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear.
Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning has the force of an epic while being so masterfully compressed it can be read in a single sitting. Majumdar writes with dazzling assurance at a breakneck pace on complex themes that read here as the components of a thriller: class, fate, corruption, justice, and what it feels like to face profound obstacles and yet nurture big dreams in a country spinning toward extremism. An extraordinary debut.
TL;DR Review
A Burning is an emotionally ravaging and poignant story about a young girl accused of terrorism. And it absolutely earns the hype it’s gotten.
For you if: You like to read important, heartbreaking literary or contemporary fiction.
Full Review
First of all, thank you to Knopf for allowing me to read an early copy of this book. It’s one of the summer’s most anticipated works of literary fiction, and it absolutely deserves the hype.
At the beginning of the story, there’s a terrorist attack — a train is bombed. Feeling voiceless, a girl named Jivan, who lives in a slum nearby, posts her frustration to Facebook and is then accused of committing the crime. We see what unfolds next through the eyes of three characters: Jivan herself; a trans woman named Lovely who’d been friends with Jivan and aspires to be an actress; and Jivan’s former gym teacher, who finds himself rising through the ranks of the opposing political party.
Two of our main characters are intensely lovable, and one is less so but still extremely human. In her truest self, Jivan is a force to be reckoned with. And Lovely — Lovely is one giant beating heart all on her own. I also thought it was interesting how we got Jivan’s and Lovely’s first person narrations, and a much more distant third person for PT Sir. There is much being said there, I think, about representation, and about individualism vs collectivism — some fight for a voice, and some are only too glad to trade theirs away, and all of them are fighting to survive.
This book is not easy to read (see trigger warnings below if you need them), but it is most certainly worth it. Majumdar moves fast and doesn’t look back at the broken pieces of your heart that she leaves behind, just like the country she’s writing about. By the end, I felt myself somewhere between sprinting toward and being dragged across the story’s conclusion. I read it in one day and will probably reread it again soon.
I recommend finishing it at home, in the evening, where you are free to be a puddle on the floor.
Trigger Warnings
Violent hate crimes, including murder and rape
Islamophobia
Transphobia
Sexual assault (mentioned)
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.