Tag: book review

The Stolen Child by Lisa Carey

fiendfullyreading

The Stolen Child by Lisa Carey

image

The Stolen Child is a heartbreaking and mysterious novel set on a remote island off the west coat of Ireland. It is about two very different sisters, Emer and Rose, who are part of the dwindling community on the island, and how their lives are affected when an American stranger, Brigid, comes to live amongst them. The narrative is difficult to adequately summarise, a epic set over just a year between 1959 and 1960, but it broadly follows what happens to make the community finally make the move to the mainland. The novel is focused primarily upon the characters, particularly Emer and her relationship with Brigid, and the world, religious, magical, and remote, in which they live.

There is a captivating element of the novel, with Carey positioning it and its events in a world where sidhe magic and religious miracles seem equally plausible, where blame, regret, and love are all complicated by the island setting, by magic, and by the belief in powers greater than humans. At the same time, The Stolen Child focuses a lot on the human and physical, on childbirth and desire, on physical isolation and the power of nature, but also on physical powers enhanced by unknown forces. This gives it a unique quality, a novel which both addresses very real emotions and difficulties whilst creating a world with rules perhaps beyond our own. The prose bolsters this world through detailed description and a straightforward yet somehow mystical tone and the use of Yeats quotes (and title) adds to the poetic feel of the novel.

The Stolen Child is the kind of novel that brings a whole minuscule universe into existence and then sets the reader within it. One for anyone who likes novels full of emotion, an undercurrent of belief, and characters caught in a savage and remote world.

How To Be Human by Paula Cocozza

fiendfullyreading

Befriending the wild: How To Be Human by Paula Cocozza

image

How To Be Human is a gripping and unusual novel about wildness, loneliness, and obsession. When a fox appears in Mary’s garden she tries to make him leave, but soon she realises they have a burgeoning connection that nobody around her will understand. As she battles against other forces – the neighbours with young children who want the fox problem dealt with and her ex-boyfriend who seems to be lurking around – Mary sees the fox as the constant in her life, but her preoccupation with the fox threatens to drown out everything else.

A plot summary does not do the novel justice. Cocozza’s writing gives the book a tight focus and draws the reader into Mary’s world, painted deftly as a place where she feels uncomfortable until she has the fox to keep her focus. It is a story of a woman befriending a fox, but it is also the story of modern day loneliness, of isolation in a city filled with etiquette and the wildness that Mary finds escape with. The writing is detailed and the action meditated, making the novel a careful exploration of how the fox changes the main character.

On the one hand, How To Be Human is a classic kind of book about a character’s mental state as they become obsessed. On the other hand, it is original and fascinating, highlighting the line between city and wilderness and how sometimes those can become blurred.

The Devil and Webster by Jean Hanff Korelitz

fiendfullyreading

The Devil and Webster by Jean Hanff Korelitz

image

The Devil and Webster is a slow burn campus novel from the perspective of a feminist scholar college president who discovers that ideals and protest are not as clear cut as she once thought. Webster College is an elite liberal arts college in New England and from its less inclusive past has transformed into a centre of free thought, inclusiveness, and protest. Its president Naomi Roth has a protesting past and when another protest sparks up on campus, she sees no reason to discourage it. However, the events that unfold question her beliefs and show that corruption can spring up anywhere and protest can be a grey area.

The novel is full of detail and is quite slow paced, but this culminates in a twist that shows how one situation can very suddenly turn into another one. Naomi’s current life is vividly painted, from her troubled relationship with her daughter Hannah – a student at Webster – to her worries about her closest friend Francine, Webster’s dean of admissions. Combined with this is an image of protest in the modern day, with social media able to spread information and misinformation in the blink of an eye. The conflict in the novel unfolds gradually and though it took a while to be sure that it was going somewhere, the ending and the way in which Naomi is caught in a seemingly futile position despite her best intentions do make it worthwhile.

From reading the acknowledgements at the end, I found out that Naomi Roth had featured in an early novel by Korelitz, but The Devil and Webster worked well as a standalone book and any mystery about Naomi’s past felt like part of the narrative. Though its pace may not appeal to everybody, it is an incisive and sometimes satirical novel about intentions, corruption, and higher education.

Before the War by Fay Weldon

fiendfullyreading

The act of writing historical irony: Before The War by Fay Weldon

image

Before The War is a historical novel set in the early twentieth century with an ironic tone and a self conscious narrator. It tells the story of Vivien Ripple, the daughter of a publisher, Sherwyn Sexton, a writer and an editor at Ripple & Co, and the events that occur after Vivien makes the unlikely suggestion that they get married. Europe tries to recover from one war and hurtles headlong into another whilst the characters find themselves entangled more messily than they imagined and the world they live in shown to be ridiculous.

Weldon writes in a humorous and metafictional style, with a narrator who skirts between exposing the act of making up details on the spot and claiming that the events are true. The narrative of the novel is farcical and not particularly original, reading like something from Waugh or Burgess perhaps, but the narratorial style provides a driving force, exposing the act of looking back at fake history from the twenty first century through direct comments to the reader and references to modern things such as Gone Girl mixed into asides. The use of hindsight and historical irony makes this a novel more about the act of writing a novel set between the world wars than one focused on a narrative in the period.

Before The War is not quite the historical novel it seems to be, but this makes it suited to readers looking for irony, self consciousness, and something akin to Evelyn Waugh writing his novels from the vantage point of the twenty first century.

The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel

fiendfullyreading

A dark tangle of thorns: The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel

image

The Roanoke Girls is a dark literary thriller about one family and their mysterious secrets. Lane Roanoke goes to live with her grandparents and wild cousin after her mother’s death, trading New York for the family home Roanoke in rural Kansas. There, she becomes drawn into the family’s history and the life that her mother escaped before Lane was born. It soon becomes apparent that Lane left after that summer, but when a sudden event brings her back to Roanoke, there is a lot to be faced about that summer.

Engel’s novel is tense and carefully constructed, with a classic thriller structure of telling past and present narratives concurrently. The writing style is simple yet atmospheric, drawing a vivid picture of the large and oppressive house and the nearby small town where Lane and her cousin Allegra search out amusement. Lane’s grappling with her own nature, her ability to love and hate, and her attempts to escape Roanoke and being one of the Roanoke girls make her a complexly figured and compelling character. Engel doesn’t feed the reader details, but leaves plenty of the past broadly painted and lets the horror simmer in the background, particularly in relation to the other girls in the family.

Though the plot is broadly a thriller or mystery type narrative, The Roanoke Girls is more than that, a haunting book about dark secrets and about the strange kinds of bonds that tie people together, whether good or bad. The epigraph is a quote from Lolita and The Roanoke Girls shares the darkly oppressive and shocking atmosphere of Nabokov’s novel, but with a lighter prose style and a mystery narrative. It is perfect for thriller fans, but also people who prefer something a little more complex, exposing a dark yet compelling side to human nature.

(Thanks to Hodder and Goodreads for the proof copy I won, which is also a gorgeous looking book.)

Himself by Jess Kidd

fiendfullyreading

The uncanny in an Irish village: Himself by Jess Kidd

Himself is a captivating novel, a magical realist mystery set in the 1970s in an Irish village that centres around the people in the community and secrets hidden in the past. Mahony returns to the village of Mulderrig to try and uncover the truth about the teenage mother he never knew, neither the living nor the dead seem to be much use in telling him what happened. As hostile locals oppose him and strange natural forces and eccentric inhabitants prove unlikely allies, he slowly discovers the secrets of the past and violence in the present.

Kidd creates a vivid world in which the uncanny blurs with the real, where the dead might be seen but they aren’t always useful, and belief and superstition might just have something useful to say. This element makes Himself much more than a mystery novel or one about returning to a small village to uncover the secrets of the past: it is also a tale of haunting, both by people and places, and about forces at work that are larger than individuals. Mahony is a typical mysterious good-looking stranger, one from Dublin who knows about the contemporary music and fashions that haven’t made it to Mulderrig, but his ability to see the dead gives him an interesting angle. The argumentative and outrageous aging actress Mrs Cauley is the most memorable character and Mahony’s unlikely ally, but the novel has a large sweep of characters as it depicts the interconnectedness of village life.

The combination of mystery, the supernatural, and a very human past of scandal and violence make Himself a gripping and atmospheric novel, enjoyable for fans of magical realism, literary mysteries, and Iain Banks in particular.

Little Nothing

fiendfullyreading

Little Nothing by Marisa Silver

Little Nothing is a story about transformation, about a girl who is a miracle, a dwarf, and a beauty, who grows up to be many other things. A cross between The Tin Drum and a fairy tale, Silver’s novel skirts the line between reality and allegory, leaving a trail of myth in its wake. The events and characters in the book fit together like a puzzle, using the fixed narrative conventions and easy coincidence of fairy tale and legend to create a story that flows from one section to the next.

The improbability and unreality of some of the events in the book may not appeal to everyone, particularly in conjunction with the more realistic elements and depiction of harsh imprisonment. However, Little Nothing is a treat for anyone who likes retellings of and new fairy tales and myths. Though lacking in the linguistic playfulness of transformation found in authors like Jeanette Winterson in favour of a more straightforward style, the novel blends the telling and enacting of stories to create a work in which fairy tales are both invented tales and reality.

Nasty Women

fiendfullyreading

Nasty Women: A Collection of Essays and Accounts On What It Is To Be a Woman in the 21st Century by 404 Ink

Nasty Women is a powerful collection of essays about being a woman in 2017 and how this intersects with a variety of other elements of identity and issues – race, class, sexuality, disability, trauma – to create a diverse and changing image of being a woman. It is about sharing experience and shows the importance of having a voice in the 21st century, at a time of political uncertainty and prejudice.

This varied collection is the kind of intersectional work that there needs to be today, with moving, sad, and often funny accounts and essays about life as a woman in some way, but with an awareness that ‘woman’ isn’t a simple term and that gender and identity is more complicated than that. The book also makes a good introduction to a range of writers in order to find out more about their work and the issues they discuss. Short and engaging essays make it a fantastic read and a call to arms to keep sharing how ideas of being a woman in some way are interconnected with a lot of other concepts and issues in the modern day.

The Transition by Luke Kennard

fiendfullyreading

Modern day housing crisis dystopia: The Transition by Luke Kennard

image

The Transition is a satirical and probing novel about modern day crises of housing, jobs, and life, and how an escape from your failings might be merely a path to further troubles. Karl and Genevieve are thirty somethings trapped under crippling debt and when the opportunity to go on a new scheme – The Transition – which involves living with an older couple and surrendering elements of freedom in order to learn how to live successfully, they opt in quickly. But what appeared like a quick fix to their issues doesn’t turn out as ideal as the blurb made it out to be.

Whilst comparisons to TV series Black Mirror are inevitable due to the near-future, technological narrative and highlighting of issues in modern society, Kennard’s novel is lighter and less focused on the technological elements. Instead, The Transition provokes thoughts on streamlining society, surrendering control to those – in this case an older generation – who know better, and how the housing crisis and overeducation issues could result in drastic measures. Karl is a blundering main character who is occasionally frustrating, but this really sets him up as one of the ideal candidates for The Transition, someone who does vaguely unethical online copywriting and essay writing and aspires no further, caught in a web of debt. His point of view allows Kennard to lead the reader through the experience of The Transition and weave a dystopian tale with a fairly ambiguous ending that leaves room for thought.

The novel was more enjoyable than expected, with a good balance of social issues and dystopian plot line. Its satirical bent makes it a lighter near future dystopian option, though it still highlights a lot of issues, from the inadequacy of the minimum wage against rising rent cost to the lack of relevant jobs for well-educated graduates. The Transition is a gripping novel that is perfect for fans of dystopian looking for something more recent or fans of Black Mirror who want similar reading material.

Man Alive

fiendfullyreading

Man Alive by Thomas Page McBee

Man Alive is a powerful memoir about the past and the future, capturing McBee’s attempts to move beyond the violence done to him in the past and work out how it affects who he is as he goes through transitioning. It is about being alive and seeing that life in the face of terrible things. The book is an exploration of masculinity, but also how to navigate a masculinity tinged by trauma and negative experience and still emerge with a sense of the man that it would be good to be.

Though the subject is serious and reflective, the style of the book is uplifting and well-written, keeping a kind of positive force pushing forward through the narrative. McBee plays around with the word ‘man’, punning on pop culture references and displaying how disparate and changing the term can be. Man Alive is an important book, the kind of memoir that should be published to celebrate life and provide a variety of models and inspiration for others who may or may not have similar circumstances.