Tag: book review

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

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This Is How You Lose the Time War is a love story across the battlegrounds of time, sci-fi turned into an epistolary romance. Red, an agent of the Commandant, finds a letter bearing the instruction ‘Burn before reading’. It is from Blue, an agent from the rival side, and it sparks off a correspondence, taunting to begin with, then growing into something more, something romantic and world-defying. Soon—or not, as this is the Time War—their bond is deep and discovery would be the end of them, and the question remains, who will win the war?

Written as a collaboration between two writers and featuring two protagonists known by colours and pronouns (both ‘she’), this is not your usual sci-fi story. Though there are teased out descriptions of the circumstances of each side, it is really focused on love and time and the myths and quirks of the multiverse. Packed with referenced despite its short length, it is a book that rewards its readers for spotting references and witty names as its protagonists do the same with each other. The creation of an aching love story told in improbably letters is an impressive feat, and the lyrical prose suits it well, particularly as the protagonists devolve into poetry and metaphor to try and explain their love across time through written words.

This is not your typical sci-fi, and those who aren’t fans of the genre should give the book a chance, though its unusual style and worldbuilding won’t be for everyone. It is forbidden love, Romeo and Juliet style, but with the complications of cause and effect and a war that seems insurmountable. It is playful and clever, almost unbearably short, and it is the pull of and between the two protagonists that brings it together.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

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Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a novel about a group of children trying to solve the disappearances that have been happening around the slum they live in. Jai is nine and watches too many real life police TV shows, so when a boy from his class goes missing, he has to recruit his friends Pari and Faiz to be his sidekicks for the investigation. They weave around various places they aren’t allowed to go—the bazaar, the railway station—looking for answers,  but as more and more children keep disappearing, the question remains: is it a djinn to blame, or is there a dangerous person out there?

The book is carefully structured around the disappearances and is well-paced to allow the events to unfold whilst capturing a sense of Jai’s life. It is notable that the book skirts the line between crime and more general fiction, with crime tropes being more part of Jai’s imagination than feeling particularly important in the novel, which is more preoccupied with character and with painting a vivid setting. This works well, as the elements work in conjunction with each other to have a narrative that moves forward, increasing tension as disappearances occur, but also looks to depict the characters’ lives rather than focus on the particular mystery at its heart. The life of these characters is portrayed in a very immersive way, using the senses and lots of detail such as the TV shows they watch and the food they eat.

The child main characters give an extra dimension to the novel, allowing Indian child disappearances to be explored through the eyes of a child who isn’t entirely aware of the potential danger and implications. This fact makes the novel feel quite distinctive and original, particularly the quirk of having a nine-year-old protagonist who is obsessed with the idea of being a detective, but who is also impacted by the very real crime occurring.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a distinctive novel that blends a crime story with an immersive narrative of children living in an Indian slum. It feels like a cross between A People’s History of Heaven and The Book Thief, with a focus on child disappearances and how they are treated by the police.

The Truants by Kate Weinberg

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The Truants is a novel about discovering the cost of being someone different, someone more noticeable, when you’ve always blended in. Jess Walker is thoroughly middle class, mostly forgotten in her large family, and about to start university. She chose her university due to an obsession with an academic there, the distinctive Lorna Clay, whose famous book ‘The Truants’ is about writers having to push themselves to the limits of life. Once there, she makes a close group of friends and their lives tangle around each other’s and Lorna’s until tragedy forces Jess to question what she thought the plot of their lives was.

In some ways, this has all the elements of a campus novel with tinges of thriller: obsession, love affairs, intellectual excitement, and the lingering comparison of real lives to fictional ones. In the case of The Truants, the latter is mostly around Agatha Christie and her works, which forms a fitting lens for Jess to attempt to untangle what is happening, though the novel itself isn’t really a murder mystery. There are clichés, but also a satisfyingly weaving narrative that isn’t afraid to leave the campus. It is a novel built around ambiguity and interpretation, and particularly by the end it isn’t clear to what extent if any Jess is an unreliable narrator, especially as she becomes interested in unreliable narrators in Christie’s writing.

The Truants will draw in fans of campus novels (and it is always exciting to read new British ones, with more familiar university experiences), though it might not be exactly what some people expect. The use of Agatha Christie as the academic focus is a nice touch which makes you tempted to pick up some of the novels mentioned in the book and the novel has enough plot to keep readers gripped, though the characters themselves are often left purposefully unexplained.

Becoming Dinah by Kit de Waal

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Becoming Dinah is a YA novel that takes the story of Moby Dick and turns it into one about a teenage girl running away from her unusual upbringing and the mistakes she’s made. Dinah is seventeen and grew up in a commune. She shaves off her hair, packs a bag, and is about to try and hitch her way south when she is persuaded by Ahab, a grumpy man with one leg also from the commune, to illegally drive a VW campervan on a quest for him. As they travel, she reflects on what she is running from and tries to work out if it is really the right course for her.

This is a touching and powerful novel that requires no knowledge of Moby Dick, though it may then inspire people to read the original. The narrative is carefully revealed and the novel leaves a lot unspoken or not discussed until near the end, so the reader is also on a quest, to find out why Dinah is running away. Despite the commune upbringing, there are a lot of relatable parts to Dinah’s story as it touches on topics such as families splitting up, sexuality, and feeling like an outsider.

Moby Dick may seem like an unusual choice for a YA modern reworking, but actually it allows themes of obsession and freedom to be explored through the eyes of a memorable protagonist.

Starling Days by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

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Starling Days is a novel about mental health, bisexuality, and how you can’t be healed by a single person. Mina lives in New York City with her husband Oscar, who has to come and fetch her when she’s found standing on the edge of a bridge and is unable to convince the officers she wasn’t about to jump. A chance need for a trip and a desire to get away lead them to travel to London, where Oscar tries to sort out selling some flats for his father and Mina finds herself drawn to Phoebe, the sister of one of Oscar’s oldest friends, whilst she tries to manage going off her medication.

This is a novel deeply about mental health, about how a person perceives their own illness and their suicidal thoughts, and how their husband both tries and fails to understand and to help. It doesn’t shy away from looking at Mina’s thought processes, but also tries to balance thoughts with narrative and with Mina and Oscar’s different perspectives. Phoebe brings another crucial element, not only about attraction, but about how Mina hopes for someone who can bring the sun when she is feeling awful, only for that to not be as easy as it might seem. A thread about Mina’s research into classical women who survive brings interesting parallels and also a comment on how women are treated, though it stays as a background thread rather than coming to the foreground.

Starling Days is moving, a sometimes blunt and sometimes understated novel that explores mental health and human relationships. 

An Honest Man by Ben Fergusson

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An Honest Man is a novel about love and Cold War tensions, set in West Berlin in 1989. Ralf is eighteen and is waiting for his exam results to see if he’s going to university in England. He and his friends spend their time together, enjoying the days of summer before they all part ways. When Ralf meets Oz at a swimming pool, he is intrigued by the man, and they are drawn closer as Oz reveals dangerous secrets about possible spies and divided loyalties. Suddenly Ralf must question what he knows about his family and his neighbours and who is really telling the truth.

The novel is a mix of low key Cold War drama, with the threat of people quietly spying on you, and coming of age novel, with a main character falling in love as he is about to leave home. This gives it a real focus on characters and interpersonal relationships, and it has a good level of drama and tension as well as details about German and English culture around the fall of the Wall as well as the lives of teenagers at this point. Ralf is a gripping protagonist, flawed in the way he lashes out but also sympathetic in his sense of betrayal and confusion at the situation he has been caught in. His narrative has twists and turns, and is cleverly written to withhold exactly what happens until the end.

This is historical fiction with a focus on the people and relationships, about someone growing up and falling suddenly in love whilst also dealing with the tense political and social realities of divided Berlin. The tense plot drives it forward, but it is the story of Ralf and Oz which gives it a real heart.

Supper Club by Lara Williams

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Supper Club is is a riotous and cutting book about food, taking up space, and female friendship. Supper Club is started up by Roberta and Stevie for fellow hungry women, looking for a chance to eat and drink to excess and to exist in ways and places that society doesn’t want. Roberta got into cooking at university, feeling alone and looking for something to take up her time, something to feel, but now, aged twenty-nine, she finally wants to revel in sharing food together. She and Stevie gather women looking for something else, fed up of other people and men and societal expectations, looking for a way to fulfil that hunger.

This is a clever, modern novel that focuses on bodies, anger, and relationships with other people. It moves between the story of Supper Club and Roberta in the present, and the story of Roberta at university and how she was formed into the person she is. Williams mixes in with these descriptions of cooking and recipes that make the book feel fully infused with food and with the joy of it, the smells and textures and processes. It is a very visceral book, reflecting the subject matter, and will delight anyone who enjoy modern stories with satirical edge and a harsh eye on women’s treatment in society.

A book that will make you hungry and disgusted at once, Supper Club is a bacchanal for the modern day and a story of female friendship and power.

Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn

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Patsy is a powerful novel about a Jamaican woman who leaves everything behind to go to America, at times heartbreaking and happy, and a moving look at identity and belonging. Patsy manages to get a visa to America, where she hopes to follow her childhood best friend and secret love Cicely who she hasn’t seen in years. To do so, she has to leave behind her young daughter Tru, who she cannot connect with like she feels she should. But America isn’t what she expected and Cicely’s life is different now. As Patsy grapples with years as an undocumented immigrant, trying to fight her own feelings and loneliness, Tru lives with her father’s family in Jamaica and is dealing with her own identity and with the abandonment by her mother.

This is an immersive and emotional novel that delves deep into Patsy’s mindsets and life, but also manages to weave in Tru’s story and the heartbreaking ways in which they are paralleled or separated. Patsy’s journey is often bittersweet, with her attempts to find the life she wants to lead often not working out as expected, and immigration being far from her dreams, but at the same time the novel is hopeful and asserts the importance of living your own life and being who you want to be. It provides an insight into race in America, especially as an undocumented immigrant, and into life and class in Jamaica, as well as the gender roles that can be oppressive and not fitting the individual. The combination of Patsy and Tru’s stories makes it particularly powerful, bringing a lot of the emotional moments as the novel grapples with ideas of parenting and what is actually best for the people involved, both mother and child.

Written in a way that feels immediate and vivid, Patsy is a novel that draws you in and gives a voice to questions of immigration, sexuality, and gender. It feels like a novel that will linger with you long after the last page, and hopefully will provide some of the representation that Patsy feels is so missing when she goes to America, unable to see people like her in certain places, from both Patsy and Tru’s depictions.

Bunny by Mona Awad

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Bunny cover with an image of a rabbit

Bunny is a novel about an outsider who ends up involved with a college clique, but it doesn’t go down how you’d expect. Samantha is an MFA student at a prestigious college, resentful of the rich girls who all each other ‘Bunny’ that she has to share workshops with. Her only friend is Ava, a weirdo from the local art college, who hates Samantha’s college and the people there. Out of the blue, the ‘Bunnies’ invite Samantha to their mysterious ‘Smut Salon’, and it seems like she is being let into the fold. However, things start to get sinister and surreal as Samantha is drawn deeper into their world.

From the summary, the book sounds like another college clique campus story, but it really isn’t. Samantha may seem like a classic heroine of such a novel—lonely, brooding, poor, unable to write despite it being how she will graduate—but the narrative is not. Instead, it takes a kind of twisted unreality and uses it to satirise writing (particularly the kinds of writing that the Bunnies are shown to do, variously pretentious and trying to be profound and dark) and to question what is happening to the characters. At first the style can be a bit irritating, but it settles down and feels purposeful (particularly the endless repeating of ‘Bunny’).

Bunny is a novel that some will find too bizarre, some will question what it really means, and others will enjoy the ride. There are some similarities with Heathers, but also with a blend of literary and teen horror; it is a book that defies reality, but also pokes fun at writing and trying to do what the novel itself is doing.

Everything You Ever Wanted by Luiza Sauma

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Everything You Ever Wanted cover

Everything You Ever Wanted is a novel about escape, sometimes eerie and sometimes heartbreaking as it charts finding a new life on a new planet. Iris works in London creating digital content, hiding her depression and anxiety, trapping in after work drinks and strategy meetings. The Life on Nyx programme sounds both insane and enticing: 100 people moving to another planet, free from social media and employment and everything else, but with the caveat that you can’t come back. And with it, maybe Iris has found her way out.

The combination of a detailed and powerful account of difficulties in modern life with an uncanny escape narrative about the failings of a space utopia works strangely well. The point at which these parts collide—where Iris chooses to leave her old life for a new one—is emotional, working on both the literal narrative level (another planet over dealing with your issues) and a more metaphorical one. The Nyx parts were better than expected for someone who isn’t big on sci-fi, much more focused on Iris’ perspective and the realities of her choice than the practicalities of them being there.

Everything You Ever Wanted takes a story of youthful burnout and mental health issues and combines it with light sci-fi and a sharp look at social media obsession. The result is a novel in an engrossing style that draws you into the central character’s mindset, with a narrative that keeps pushing forward.