Tag: book review

The Martian’s Regress by J.O. Morgan

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The Martian’s Regress is a book of poetry about a single Martian who returns to Earth, focusing on origin stories, future, and the environment. It is split into separate short poems, but it is also a single work exploring the martian’s present life and the previous history of his people. This is poetry that tells stories and reflects on the stories told by others, and on how you keep going when alone. The martian’s exploration of the now broken and empty Earth is a highlight, as various poems/sections consider the reality of the emptiness.

There are obvious modern themes, from the environmentalism and look at the future of the planet, to the currently weirdly relevant look at being isolated, and the collection has an eerie sense at times, as if you’re also with the Martian. At the same time, it can be light hearted, and also shows how poetry and science fiction can come together in interesting ways to create certain atmospheres. It is a book to read all at once, rather than taking in separate poems, to fully immerse in the story and setting.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

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Hamnet is a novel fictionalising the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet to look at what happens to a family already stretched between Stratford-upon-Avon and London. One day in 1596, a girl falls ill, and her twin brother searches for help. Their mother is out of the house and their father in London, where he makes his living as a playwright. Soon, one of the twins will be dead of the plague, a death that resonates across the family and through time due to the name connection with the famous play.

The novel moves between the ‘present’ narrative of Hamnet’s last days and the aftermath of his death, and the past, the meeting of a tutor and a woman with a kestrel who will marry and give life to Hamnet and his sisters. The writing style is poetic and readable, making the novel flow far more easily than a lot of historical fiction, and getting across the sense of fate and prescience that Agnes in particular believes in. O’Farrell paints a vivid picture of Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife (there’s a note at the end about why she chose to use this name for her rather than the more well known Anne) and Hamnet’s mother, not only her quirks but also how she deals with the grief and with the constant separation from her husband, who she knew needed to go to London.

There are plenty of fictionalised versions of Shakespeare, but this one, which focuses more on his family and on a kind of inevitability that wouldn’t be out of place in his plays, is on the more engaging end of the scale, for not trying to answer questions about his life as much as paint a story of loss and a strained relationship. The obvious links with the plague and the present day makes these a strangely timely novel in some ways, but hopefully that won’t be all it’ll be read for.

Non-Binary Lives: An Anthology of Intersecting Identities ed. by Jos Twist, Ben Vincent, Meg-John Barker and Kat Gupta

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Non-Binary Lives is a collection of personal essays by non-binary people on elements of their lives and identities. As a whole, the anthology considers the range of experiences of being non-binary in the modern day, and how gender identity intersects with race, class, disability, faith, sexuality, and more. The writers come from various backgrounds and the book shows a real range of narratives, showing that there isn’t one way to be non-binary nor is there a typical non-binary person. The pieces are short and numerous, making it easy to keep reading, and the author bios after each essay allow you to connect the writer to their other work easily.

This is an important collection, both in bringing these stories together to be shared and opening up a range of experiences to show people—regardless of their gender—how varied non-binary lives are and expose them to different points of view. 

Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

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Hex is a novel about obsession, complicated relationships, and poison set around a university campus. Nell Barber was expelled from her PhD after the death of a fellow student, but is still desperate to keep trying to find answers for the detoxification of poisonous plants. She is obsessed with her advisor and mentor, Joan, who thinks she should try and pursue less controversial work, and they both find themselves in a web of relationships and grudges that may be more toxic than the plants Nell is now growing in her empty apartment.

Hex is a surprising novel, which seems like it is going to be about poison and death, and turns out to be about relationships and obsession. Written in the second person as Nell’s notebooks, the book’s unusual style and lack of real plot won’t be for everyone, but it creates an atmosphere and draws you into Nell’s obsession, which is less about the poisonous plants and more about Joan. The blend of details about plants and Nell’s focus on the other characters works well in giving it the claustrophobic sense of a campus novel that centres around a small group of people whilst using the academic work as a way of exposing elements of the story and characters.

Going into Hex expecting a poison-focused version of The Secret History probably will leave you disappointed, as it lacks the threat of Tartt’s novel, but it is an interesting look at obsessive love and the complexity of relationships, and one for anyone who likes slightly dark novels set at universities.

Sharks in the Time of Saviours by Kawai Strong Washburn

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Sharks in the Time of Saviours is the story of a family, a miraculous son, and life in modern Hawaii. When Nainoa is seven, he is saved from drowning by sharks, and his parents see this as a sign things are looking up for them. But things aren’t simple for Nainoa, and for his siblings Dean and Kaui who both feel like he has a special place in their parents’ affections. Each of them travels to mainland USA looking for something, but things don’t work out as their parents hope.

It is difficult to know what to expect from this novel, which starts with a kind of mystical atmosphere as Nainoa is saved and becomes a kind of myth, but also looks at the struggles of economic downturn, and later the tarnished American dream. The magical elements, though vital to the narrative and the blended atmosphere of myth and harsh reality, are much less prevalent than you might assume, which works well with the different characters’ senses of the myth elements of the book. Though Nainoa’s narrative is the more unusual, it is through Dean and Kaui that you get a real sense of the novel’s power as their connections to Hawaii and their family become complicated and change, and the dreams or goals they once had become untenable.

This is a novel for people who like stories that combine sadness and harsh circumstances with interesting explorations of place, myth, and people. For many readers it’ll give new ways to think about Hawaii and how people might interact with it as a home and what they might seek in mainland USA.

Only Mostly Devastated by Sophie Gonzales

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Only Mostly Devastated is a YA reimagining of Grease, in which a summer fling becomes a complicated school situation. Ollie and Will’s summer fling seemed perfect, but when Ollie didn’t go back home to California but stayed with his family to help look after his sick aunt, he finds himself at a new school in North Carolina. It turns out Will goes to the school too, and the guy from the summer isn’t the same amongst his straight basketball team friends. Ollie doesn’t want to spend all his time pining after someone who isn’t ready for a relationship, but his new friends aren’t enough to distract him, and Will seems conflicted about what he wants.

The first thing to say is that I’ve never seen Grease. I know many of the songs and some ideas from it, but otherwise nothing, and this wasn’t detrimental to enjoying the book at all. The book seemed most focused both on the difficulties of not being straight in high school and navigating that, as well as other teenage issues and family emergencies. The tapestry of different characters and their personalities worked well to make it more than just the synopsis, though Ollie made a good protagonist, caring but also in need of realising when he was being self-absorbed. The amount of the plot that deals with someone trying to make sure nobody realises they aren’t straight did make me worry that it would feature someone being outed against their will (pun unintended), but the plot lampshades this as an issue earlier on rather than doing it.

Only Mostly Devastated is a fun YA romance that knows it is updating a few tropes and playing around with different high school romance narratives. The protagonist is three-dimensional and is given more going on in his life than the romance or the circumstances that cause the plot, and the story is enjoyable if not groundbreaking.

Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen

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Big Girl, Small Town is the story of Majella, a woman with a predictable life that other people find odd, and how a family death shakes up her routine. Majella lives with her alcoholic mother in the same small town in Northern Ireland that she’s always lived in. She works in the chip shop, doesn’t like small talk, and knows her daily routine. Other people seem to think her grandmother’s recent death should have more of an impact on her, but Majella doesn’t see any change in her life, until it turns out her grandmother had a will nobody knew about.

The novel covers a week in Majella’s life, the minute details and the long list of things she dislikes, and uses timestamps and dialect to give a real picture of her reality. The Northern Ireland setting—from her father’s disappearance during the Troubles to the language used in the book—is vital to the novel and gives an insight into the very real kind of world that is fictionalised in the novel. The narrative isn’t so much about major plot points happening as how events have a day to day impact and even big things can become part of the everyday. 

This is a novel that may sound like a lot of books centred around an unusual protagonist whose everyday routine is thrown off, but the setting and facts of Majella’s life make it something different, and a look at being classed odd in a town that has a kind of ‘normal’ that a lot of people would think is odd in itself. Majella is a memorable character who will likely stick with readers after the final pages.

Come Again by Robert Webb

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Come Again is a surprising, genre-defying novel about a woman who has recently lost her husband. Since Kate’s husband Luke died, things have started to fall apart, and she can’t help but focus on the fact that he’d technically been ill ever since she met him during Freshers’ Week years ago and fell in love. After dramatically losing her job in shady circumstances, Kate suddenly wakes up in the wrong place: her eighteen-year-old self’s body, just starting university. She has the chance to try and change things, but is that even possible, and what might it mean for the future?

From the blurb, the book sounded like One Day or something similar, a story about love happening regardless of circumstance or across time. However, it turned out to be quite different: a kind of tragicomic love story with a side of dodgy dealings and spies. If it is about anything, it is possibly about grief and about being unpredictable (both characters defying expectations others have of them in the narrative, and the actual narrative itself). It took a while to settle into the novel, with a few details or comments from characters that felt a bit off, but it became more immersive and raised questions about where the plot was going to go next. The tone changes somewhat between the different sections, but it suited the novel which has a kind of funny yet sad quirkiness (also a description that could work for Kate as a character).

Come Again is a light read that blends different genre conventions to be a funny book about grief, moving on, and, strangely, when your life becomes a little bit more like the plot of multiple different bits of fiction. It is easy to imagine it as a quirky film that leans heavily on the different sections having different styles and tones (and the fast pace of the novel would probably suit being adapted into a film).

Haunted Voices: An Anthology of Gothic Storytelling from Scotland

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The Haunted Voices cover with a tiny ghost in a tiny jar on top.

Haunted Voices is a collection of spooky stories by Scotland’s oral storytellers, in both text and audio format. The stories are short and varied, including some from archival recordings of past storytellers and others that are distinctly modern involving video shops and ghosts watching Love Island. The collection has a wide range of tales, all featuring gothic elements but with varying levels of terror and humour, and often a sense of locality and oral tradition.

Though the anthology has two elements, text and audio, it is difficult not to think of all of the pieces as how they’d be told out loud, even when reading the book. The variety of the collection makes it exciting to see what is coming next, and the short length of the stories means that readers could easily pick and choose which to read or listen to at what point. As someone who doesn’t listen to audiobooks due to an inability to focus on them, I read the collection first, then went back and listened to some of the stories that had stuck with me, but I imagine that for a lot of people, it will be the audio version that is the real selling point, and the text more of a bonus extra. Some of my highlights were ‘Soul Mates’, a goth love story in a graveyard (there are a lot of graveyards in the collection, as you might expect), ‘the possession’, a tale of hungry ghosts and what they really want, and ‘The Cravin’, a comic yet thoughtful reimagining of Poe’s ‘The Raven’.

This collection features a range of stories, storytellers, and Scottish locations, really showcasing the fact that Gothic oral storytelling is alive and haunting. The audio version will definitely appeal to anyone who enjoys spooky podcasts and similar audio storytelling forms, and the text version is great for dipping in and out of due to the short length of the stories.

(Get the book or audiobook from Haunt Publishing)

You Let Me In by Camilla Bruce

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You Let Me In is an eerie gothic novel about the life of one woman and how stories can be true and false at once. Novelist Cassandra Tipp has disappeared, and left behind a long manuscript, a letter to her niece and nephew that starts to unfold the truth behind the murders that she is infamous in the local area for being somehow involved with, though her guilt could never be proven. As her narrative progresses, it is clear there are two stories: one of faeries in the woods, gifts, and blood, and another of a girl mistreated, tormented and tormenting, who imagined an alternate reality. The question is, what to believe?

This is a distinctively written novel which uses a metafictional framing device to pose questions about whether the protagonist lived a life of magic, abuse, or both. As with a lot of modern gothic novels, the gothic elements are there to be questioned as they seem to stand in for terrible realities, but also to feel like a fleshed out, supernatural world. The quirks of the narrative voice—from the bookending sections written as hypotheticals to elements of style and naming—create some of the atmosphere, particularly around the horror of Cassandra’s faerie companion, with whom she has a twisted relationship spanning her entire life. Don’t expect answers with this book: the ambiguities are purposefully there to leave the readers, both fictional and real, asking questions and wondering which stories were meant to be ‘true’ and what ‘true’ might even mean.

You Let Me In is a good example of how the use of supernatural can blur the line between ‘it was all people making it up’ and ‘the monsters were real’. It is a novel that self-consciously only gives the reader as much as the protagonist is being shown to want to share, and is a creepy story however you interpret the narrative. The gothic is a genre for using the imaginative work of the reader as part of the thrill, and that is what You Let Me In does, asking you to be Cassandra’s audience and consider the narrative options. This ambiguity won’t be for everyone, but it suits the novel and genre well.