The Gunners by Rebecca Kauffman

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The Gunners is a meditative novel that looks at friendship, life difficulties, and difference. Mikey, Sam, Lynn, Alice, Jimmy and Sally were childhood friends, united by their relative freedom as latchkey kids and the abandoned house they made their den. When they were sixteen, Sally disappeared from their lives, no longer their friend seemingly without reason. Years later, they reunite for the first time for her funeral, and it turns out there were plenty of unspoken secrets about the time when Sally left.

The premise of The Gunners doesn’t sound particularly original, but the novel itself is quirky and thoughtful. It goes down routes that might not be expected, showing the differences in friendships and the ways in which people’s lives diverge and come together. It has a real focus on friendship that isn’t undercut as it can be in other novels and it really engages with the weirdness of drifting away from a group you were very close with and then coming back together. The ensemble cast is handled well, with the narrative looking into the childhood of each character alongside the present day.

A novel about friendship and hardship that keeps the focus on the friends, The Gunners was an enjoyable read, if at times as elusive with the past narrative as the characters were.

F, M or Other: Quarrels with the Gender Binary Volume 1 by Knight Errant Press

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F, M or Other is an anthology of pieces that address variance in gender and identity, across poetry, prose, essays, and graphic storytelling. This variation in form and in genre and style means that as well as a range of personal and fiction experiences, it allows for a range of taste in written material too. Readers will likely have personal connections to various pieces in different ways, and not feel connected to others. This feels important in a book that is trying to question thinking about gender and present a multiplicity of answers to questions about gender.

Personal highlights were much of the poetry—especially those that made literary references, including Greek mythology and Hemingway (the latter surprisingly effective), and the opening short poem about the gender box on forms—a prose piece about drag transformation with a difference, and some gripping personal essays and letters that explore defining yourself and expanding definitions of larger concepts such as ‘womanhood’ or ‘masculinity’. Other people might prefer some of the speculative fiction or in depth essays, or find personal connections with other pieces. F, M or Other seems to be saying that it is okay to think about gender in different ways and relate to the anthology in different ways.

Angry, heartwarming, and funny, this is an anthology which can both help people begin to grapple with questions of how gender is lived and discussed and also provide relatable content and different viewpoints to people who’ve already started thinking about gender in theirs and others’ lives. It is worth picking up and giving a go, however complicated or uncomplicated your current relationship to gender is. As this is only volume 1, it will be interesting to see the range of pieces in the second volume and what experiences they depict and styles used within them.

[get it from https://knighterrantpress.com/]

Rewriting the wanderer: Melmoth by Sarah Perry

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Melmoth is Sarah Perry’s reimagining of Charles Maturin’s 1820 gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer. Helen Franklin lives in Prague and spends every day haunted by something she did twenty years ago. When one of her only friends hands her a strange manuscript that talks about a mysterious woman in black who walks the earth witnessing the guilty, Helen is drawn into confronting her past whilst uncovering the stories of those who have met this woman. However, Helen can’t help have the feeling that someone is watching her too.

Perry transforms most of Maturin’s book into something different, but keeps the sense of many stories about Melmoth, using inset narratives like Maturin. It must be said, however, that Perry’s are far more engaging and less digressive, with a strong framing narrative alongside the character of Melmoth (something which Melmoth the Wanderer doesn’t have to the same extent). Helen’s mysterious past is a classic gothic plot device brought into the modern day and the lives of the other characters she meets (and those in the inset narratives she reads about) show how everyone carries kinds of guilt with them.

The Prague setting again gives it a classic gothic feel, with descriptions of atmospheric architecture and also of tourists and tourist traps that give an updated sense of foreignness and being out of place, something which often features in gothic literature. The narrative voice is distinctive and strange, fitting perfectly with what it turns out it is doing. Melmoth is less about scariness than about the darkness of moral complexity and escaping the consequences of guilt.

Characters in Melmoth refer to Maturin’s earlier novel as a book nobody reads, and as someone who has read Melmoth the Wanderer, Sarah Perry’s version is a far more enjoyable read. It grapples with moral questions and ideas of redemption whilst using gothic tropes—particularly stories within stories—to create an atmospheric novel that does away with the devil aspect of Maturin’s story to focus on the darkness within humanity.

HWFG by Chris McQueer

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There’s ways of showing your follow-up book is going harder than the first, and then there’s calling it Here We Fucking Go. HWFG is the darker sibling to Hings, McQueer’s first collection of short stories, in which some big personalities from the first book have new adventures and the ‘drink, drugs, and knees on backward’ (my own summary) of Hings become the meaning of Brexit, the horrible truth about moths, and fighting Kim Jong-Un.

Hings was hilarious and uncanny; HWFG takes the black comedy up a few notches, with serial killer haircuts and the threat of a giant squid looming over two warring friends. Mostly the stories are very short with great payoffs, making them easy to dip into, and there are a few longer ones that may be my favourites. ‘The Biggest Riddy’ feels like those That Mitchell and Webb Look sketches about The Event with a dash of Black Mirror and is expertly pitched to be dystopian and weird. ‘Leathered’ combines the horror of the modern political world with the idea of the ramifications of social media, all wrapped up in a ridiculous narrative.

HWFG may be better than Hings, with gleeful black comedy and a sense throughout the book that the real world is terrible and unbelievable, so short stories might as well be too. Buy it for everyone you know who likes weird dark comedy or leave it in your bathroom for guests to pick up on the toilet and be freaked out by.

[cheers to 404 Ink for the proof copy, and you can preorder HWFG here]

Paperback Crush by Gabrielle Moss

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The Totally Radical History of ‘80s and ’90s Teen Fiction

Paperback Crush is a fascinating and funny look at American teen fiction from the gap between Judy Blume and Harry Potter. Moss divides up the books by themes, and looks at how areas such as romance, friends, school, and fear sparked off a whole range of books aimed at the young adult and middle grade market. There’s plenty of focus on how well the books actually dealt with big (and small issues), but Moss writes with a witty, light-hearted tone too, combining nostalgia, light mocking with hindsight, and some actual analysis of how the trends worked and fitted into the framework of young adult fiction that came before and afterwards.

As someone who is both British and too young for these books’ heyday, the real selling point was the ‘Terror’ chapter, as I was a great lover of first Goosebumps and then, even more intensely, Point Horror (Moss’ point that the students at Salem University from Diane Hoh’s Nightmare Hall series should’ve just dropped out felt like a ‘oh, right, they should have’ moment, because I did not think that at the time of reading them). However, the whole book was an enjoyable read, a quick look through a kind of book that shaped a lot of people’s lives and have had an impact on the young adult fiction of today. Moss’ tone makes it funny and engaging, but Paperback Crush is also an interesting look at how these often flawed books did deal with topics that some may assume only modern YA does. Plus, it has a lot of pictures of hilariously bad paperback teen novel covers with witty commentary.

What If It’s Us by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera

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What If It’s Us is a YA novel by two well-known authors that combines classic romcom tropes with a realistic sense of teenagers navigating life. Arthur is in NYC for the summer and it’s living up to his dreams. Ben has lived in New York all his life and has recently broken up with his boyfriend, who he’s also stuck in summer school with. When Arthur and Ben meet by chance in a post office, it isn’t clear whether the universe is trying to get them together or ruin things between them.

What really sets What If It’s Us apart is the way that it both embraces romantic tropes—such as someone only being in the city for a limited time—but also gives them a realistic spin, showing how life can seem like a musical or a comedy when really it is just life, full of ups and downs. There is a sense of uncertainty throughout the book as to what will happen with Arthur and Ben which powers the narrative and shows how it is difficult to expect good or bad with confidence. The supporting characters are endearing, particularly Ben’s best friend Dylan, and the book is a great light read that gives complexity to its teenage characters.

Broken Things by Lauren Oliver

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Broken Things is a gripping YA thriller about friendship and how things are more complicated than they seem. Anyone on the internet can read about how Mia and Brynn murdered their best friend Summer in the woods, in a way similar to the fan fiction the three of them wrote as a sequel to the fantasy novel The Way into Lovelorn that the author left unfinished. The thing is, Mia and Brynn didn’t do it. Five years later, they’re no longer friends and they’re not doing well. A chance discovery leads them back into the mystery and soon they must confront the past whilst looking for the truth not only of what happened to Summer, but about their friendship with her.

It is a clever, moving young adult novel that combines the tension of the truth about Summer’s murder with exploration of the characters of Mia, Brynn, and Summer. Their obsession with Lovelorn – particularly Summer’s – is shown as a way of coping with their lives; the world of fandom is not demonised, but rather shown in different lights, and the focus is really on the real world, rather than the fictional one. Particularly fascinating is Brynn, who fakes a drink and drug problem because rehab is the only place she feels safe, away from the people accusing her of murder and away from the truth of her feelings for Summer. Broken Things has a classic wrongly-accused-and-must-find-the-real-killer narrative, combined with engaging characters dealing with real problems.

In some ways, Broken Things is about looking beyond what you can read on the internet. The initial story of the murder sounds a lot like something you might read on Buzzfeed or Tumblr as an unexplained mystery, and then the novel goes on to expose the impact of that happening to innocent people. It is the kind of novel that you can’t put down because you need to know what actually happened, but also need to know if the characters can move on.

Astroturf by Matthew Sperling

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Astroturf is a wicked, modern novel about sock puppet accounts, steroids, and using identities. Ned is a web developer who broke up with his girlfriend a few months ago and lives in a tiny bedsit in London. Naturally skinny, his world is changed by his trainer’s suggestion that he try using steroids to bulk up a bit. Suddenly, Ned feels more energised and like he’s found a secret to revitalising his life. He becomes obsessed with an online forum for steroid users, hashing out a plan that may bring him immense success, but that requires him to delve into the world of online accounts, pharmaceutical suppliers, and fake identities.

Sperling does a clever job of making a funny novel about sock puppet accounts, something that in the modern world can do a lot of damage to real people online in very serious ways, but in the novel they are defanged by using only the steroid forum world rather than a larger political and social online sphere. It is clear that many of the characters are meant to have questionable views, but the novel looks at how Ned uses and becomes involved in these fake identities in an immoral way that doesn’t need to feature offensive views for shock value. Indeed, it is a book that doesn’t rely on shock tactics, though it clearly could have, but instead creates a kind of concise mundanity to Ned’s progression. Ideas of masculinity are unsurprisingly explored and it is interesting to see how much of Ned’s accounts’ personas are built with comedy masculine traits.

This short novel is a book to read in one sitting if possible, telling a complete tale without a huge number of twists and turns that satirises internet culture and how men interact with it. You could imagine it as a dark comedy sitcom, with a slacker-type main character who finds a cheat code for getting somewhere, but it turns out that cheat code isn’t the steroids themselves but the online community.

The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy by Mackenzi Lee

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The follow up to The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue—a romp across eighteenth-century Europe as Henry Montague’s Grand Tour goes awry and he finds himself getting into scapes and adventures alongside his sister and the guy he’s secretly in love with—finds Felicity Montague, Monty’s sister, on a quest to get a formal education in medicine. However, chances for women to study medicine in the eighteenth-century aren’t forthcoming, and Felicity ends up on a scheme to meet and work with one of her heroes who is about to marry Felicity’s estranged childhood friend. To pull this off, she must work with a mysterious woman with an agenda of her own who wants to travel to the wedding as Felicity’s maid, but as with the previous book in the series, this is only the start of a journey that crosses countries and the sea.

Again, Mackenzi Lee shows how historical YA fiction should be done. Felicity is a powerful main character, deeply flawed like her brother, desperate to achieve her dreams. She even is forced to confront her own internalised misogyny and to realise that there are things outside her experience that she needs to learn about and consider. Johanna and Sim are both varied and interesting characters who contribute towards Felicity’s personal reflection as well as the exciting narrative, and in general Lee endeavours to show female characters finding different ways to fight back.

The playful approach to history found in Gentleman’s Guide is continued here, with some details changed for plot reasons as highlighted in an author’s note after the text, but this one feels more cuttingly historical in some ways, possibly due to greater reflection on oppression and continuing themes picked up in the earlier book. Have no fear though, there’s plenty of pirates and schemes and sea dragons to keep the adventure going too.

Fans of the first book will probably love this one For anyone else, this is a book for people who love female figures in history and would like a fun, exciting novel about fictional ones, particularly women involved in science, nature, and piracy. Aimed at young adult readers but great for anyone looking for a light, exhilarating read, it is charming but also manages to provide reflection on the situation and treatment of different people, then and now. Felicity will be a hero for many people.