Tag: books

Here Again Now by Okechukwu Nzelu

fiendfullyreading

Here Again Now is a novel about love, bonds, and grief, as three men try and work out what family is for them. Achike is an actor finally breaking into the industry, just having bought a flat in Peckham, where his best friend Ekene, who he’s known since they were both teenagers, has been living temporarily. Their bond is deep, but fragile and potentially changing. When Achike’s father Chibuike also moves into the flat, the three men suddenly have to work out their dynamics with each other, until tragedy strikes and their bonds change yet again.

This is a bittersweet, often sad novel, that focuses a lot on grief and missed chances to show love, but it also looks a lot at different kinds of bonds between men and ways that fathers and sons express connections. The opening of the book explores Achike and Ekene’s relationship, and I found it compelling and believable, especially all the little moments between them and yet the boundaries they kept up. The narrative quickly becomes heartbreaking, and then moves between the present and past, with not much happening except an exploration of two characters finding new ways to relate to each other. The prose style worked well for the content, feeling lyrical and sad, but despite the tragedy, the book also focuses on how people navigate moving on whilst grieving and coming to terms with their relationship with someone who is gone.

Tender and bittersweet, this is a book that explores bonds between men in different forms and how relationships change and develop. It is more of a character study of three men than something with a lot of plot and it doesn’t bring much resolution, which won’t be for everyone, but it offers a lot between its pages.

Sundial by Catriona Ward

fiendfullyreading

Sundial is a twisting tale of a family and the horrors that lie beneath the surface, as a mother and daughter take a trip to an old family home. Rob appears to have a normal suburban life with her husband Irving and her two daughters, Callie and Annie. However, she fears for them, for the strangeness of Callie and for what she could do to Annie, and when she thinks Callie has become too dangerous, she takes her to Sundial, her own childhood home in the Mojave desert. But Sundial is a place filled with secrets, and Callie is scared of what her mother might do to her, as she learns the story of her mother’s past.

I’ve not read Catriona Ward before but heard hype around The Last House on Needless Street, and I didn’t know what to expect going into this one. What it turned out to be was an unsettling story of ideas of who is good and bad, centred around a woman whose part wasn’t quite what she thought it was. The opening feels disarmingly regular, showing a marriage in breakdown and fears about children, but nothing particular weird, and then once you start to learn about Sundial, things get weirder, into a world of science experiments and doubleness and what you have to do to really protect someone. I enjoyed the twists and turns, even when they were a bit outlandish, and the ending works well, leaving a creepy lingering sense of ambiguity.

Without wanting to give away much more, I will say that Sundial is a slowly tense read that unfolds multiple stories that leave you never quite sure what exactly is meant to be true. 

The Doloriad by Missouri Williams

fiendfullyreading

The Doloriad is a dark, surreal novel about a family of survivors living in a nightmare future. Some kind of environmental apocalypse has occurred and almost everyone is gone, except a family living on the outskirts of a city, sustained by incest and ruled over by the Matriarch. The careful balance of power and attempts to grow and scavenge what they need are interrupted when the Matriarch sends away her daughter Dolores, in the hope of marrying her to other survivors who she believes are out there.

If the summary doesn’t suggest it enough, I’ll say it: this is a weird book. It revels in this weirdness, packed full of strange jokes and references (perhaps the most notable being a TV show in which Thomas Aquinas turns up to solve disputes) and written like a Greek tragedy (with all the violence and incest you might expect from one). The writing style is distinctive, with long descriptive sentences and a narrative voice that moves between characters fluidly, and this makes the book feel both very new and older than it is (maybe partly because of the Czech stuff in it, but it did draw to my mind Kafka and other similar writers, where you have to pay attention through the absurd).

The Doloriad is not an easy book to review, definitely unforgettable, well written, and with a haunting philosophical question: at what cost is survival against all odds and is it really worth it? It’s probably a love/hate type book, with the meandering plot and shifting perspectives (and dark content) not for everyone, but it really sets out what near-future fiction could be, beyond what has been imagined before.

Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

fiendfullyreading

Our Wives Under The Sea is a disquieting novel about a woman dealing with her wife returning after a deep sea mission gone wrong and realising that things cannot go back to how they were. Miri’s wife Leah went down on a submarine for a research project and didn’t come back for six months, far longer than she was meant to be gone, and now she’s back, she’s not the same, distant and unsettling. Not knowing what happened or what will happen to Leah, Miri has to try and navigate an unknown reality whilst grieving for their past life together.

The atmosphere of this book is amazing, a deeply eerie world both above and below sea level, and it really gets across the isolation not only of Leah when under the sea, but Miri now that Leah is back. In a sense, it is about unknowable horror, but in another sense, it is about what happens when the person you love changes and you have to stand by and watch. The book moves between longer chapters from Miri’s present perspective and shorter chapters that are Leah documenting what happened underwater, and these work well together, leaving you unsettled by both parts of the narrative and unfolding as much about Miri and Leah’s past together as Leah’s being trapped underwater in a way that cleverly combines horror and love story, both understated.

This novel felt like a really good concept for a story expanded into something rich and lyrical that meditates on loneliness, love, and what might be lurking under the sea. It isn’t about answers, but about unknowable depths and what happens when things don’t seem to be making sense but you just have to keep going anyway.

At Certain Points We Touch by Lauren John Joseph

fiendfullyreading

At Certain Points We Touch is a novel about remembering the past, doomed love, and a millennial stumble through friendship and cities, as a writer tries to tell the story of their dead lover. A trans writer living in Mexico realises that it is the anniversary of the death of a man they loved, and starts to write the story of them, together and apart, and the messy, toxic, desperate affair they had.

This is a masterful novel, sharp and clever, that explores how we tell stories and what millennial queer life is like, almost haunted by the ghosts of previous queer culture in London, San Francisco, and New York. At times it feels like an older novel, but then it throws in modern references and muses on the longevity of digital culture, and you remember that this is recent. In fact, the parts about digital preservation were some of my favourite bits of writing in the book, musing on how a MySpace profile could endure if civilisations couldn’t.  

You know from the start that it is building towards Thomas James’ death, and you really understand how the narrator wants to hold off getting there and telling a death they weren’t there for as much as they want to unfold the story. The book is also a knowing wink towards writing and autofiction, considering what is memory and story even when something is meant to be ‘what happened’, but this is combined with exploits and community and stumbling into things whilst young in ways that stop it just feeling like a book about writing a book.

With an almost haunting sense of the recent past and grief, At Certain Points We Touch is a novel that really paints a portrait, not just of the narrator’s lover, but of the narrator themselves, of cities and bad rooms, and of growing up as a millennial and traversing different kinds of culture and community.

At Least This I Know by Andrés N. Ordorica

fiendfullyreading1 Comment

At Least This I Know is a collection of poetry that explores belonging in a range of forms: nation, race, sexuality, family, future, and more. The book is split into sections – ‘Where I begin’, ‘How I have grown’, ‘What I have lost’, ‘What I have given’, ‘He that I love’ and ‘Where I will burn’ – and I really liked how this took you on a journey through the poems, enacting journeys of the poet and also giving a sense of going deeper into issues of belonging and self.

I knew I was going to like the collection from the first poem ‘November 16th, 2014’, which is a perfect opening for it: a moment at border control, encapsulating fear and desire for a place to belong, and a poem that almost makes you laugh and cry at once. From there, the collection moves on to images of family, like being passed photos around and told stories, and then onto growing up and queerness, loss, and place. 

I really liked the use of repetition in many of the poems, used to various effects, for example in ‘By the seashore’, one of my favourites in the collection, in a way that really gets across how certain details can become entwined with grief and traumatic moments. Also, the repetition (and variation) in ‘These pyramids are houses for the dead’ stood out to me, especially with the font size changes, and the poem has such a powerful sense of place and what people can lay claim to.

I also like the understated love poetry in the collection, especially ‘We are young and still have time’ and ‘It had been so long’, which both have a beautiful sense not only of tiny moments of love, but also time, the seeming unreality of it and maybe how queerness impacts that, changing the effects of looking back or thinking of a future.

In short, I loved this collection, which captured me from the start, with its wit, phrasing and powerful simplicity combined with explorations of all sorts of things that make up a person and make them feel like they belong somewhere. Occasionally I had to pause reading at the end of a poem to think ‘damn, that’s good’.

(Note: Thanks for 404 Ink for the proof copy – the book is out now via their website)

Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi

fiendfullyreading

Bitter is the follow up to Emezi’s Pet, a prequel that explores the world of Bitter, Jam’s mother, and her choices as a teenager between staying safely in her special school for the arts, Eucalyptus, or fight for the city, Lucille. Outside of Eucalyptus, an activist group fights for a better city, against the injustices that billionaires and officials create and perpetuate, but Bitter feels unable to leave the sanctuary of her school, after a traumatic childhood, and wants to focus on her painting. But her friends are drawn to the fight, and when Bitter’s art takes an unexpected turn, she finds herself at the centre of the action.

Pet was such a powerful book, a young adult book that felt wise and yet deeply readable, and I also like Emezi’s other books, so I was excited for this one. It is quite different to Pet, with some of the teenage drama that wasn’t in the previous book and with a focus on types of action and how to achieve change. I really liked the characters, who all have distinct interests and lives (though Blessing didn’t get much of a role beyond being Bitter’s best friend), and I liked how it gave background to Pet whilst also being very different to it. It has more of an older feel than Pet in some ways, with the characters being slightly older and the focus being on their action and their futures, and slightly more of a YA fantasy feel, especially in the second half of the book, whereas Pet was harder to define.

The focus on art and protest in Bitter and ways in which characters found and built community were powerful, though it is interesting that in the end, violence and power do get the change Lucille needs, even if the characters fight against using violence. I didn’t find that Bitter gripped me in quite the same way as Pet, but I liked that it was different and it has more of a coming-of-age feel, as Bitter works out her place in a flawed world.

The Cuckoo Cage ed. by Ra Page

fiendfullyreading

The Cuckoo Cage is a collection that reimagines British folk heroes into new everyday superheroes, fighting against modern evils with the spirit of older community action. The short stories from a range of writers take the idea of the superhero and combine it with direct action and some of the mot pressing issues in Britain today, like food poverty, racism, and inequality. Each story is followed by an afterword that goes into the historical figures that inspired each story, offering context to the stories but also introductory history to some of the key action taken in the past against injustice and tyranny.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the collection, but its distinctive conceit drew me in, and I liked the near-future setting of the stories, which all seem to be set in the same universe (adding to the comparisons with more traditional superhero comics and films). There’s a lot of creativity in the kinds of powers the new superheroes have and the ways in which the original folk figure comes through, particularly through ideas like being able to topple statues using portals or create political memes through mind reading politicians, and the stories are gripping and fun, showing the heroes in action rather than just describing what they might do.

One of the real highlights of the book is the sense of timeless protest that comes from the conversation between the short stories and the afterwords, giving readers the chance to think about how history is told and how we might view figures that the establishment didn’t want to give credit to, whether real people or folk figures symbolic of a larger movement. The only one of the figures I already knew about was Martin Marprelate, and I enjoyed the way that the pamphlet culture of the 16th century was turned into online memes of the modern day in the story ‘The M & Ms’, showing how there’s always more ephemeral forms that can move faster than the pace of established stories and news.

Unlike a lot of superhero stories, which feel like an attempt to tell you that the world is okay and will be saved without action, The Cuckoo Cage reimagines superheroes as direct action whilst paying tribute to the history of this action in Britain. I think its combination of history and social realism with fantasy will appeal to a lot of people, and I liked the way that it felt like the stories came together by the end, as people might expect from superhero narratives these days that are part of the same universe. Clever and insightful, this book might inspire people to look deeper into alternative narratives and think about how, even without superpowers, action can be taken.

All The White Spaces by Ally Wilkes

fiendfullyreading

All The White Spaces is a historical horror story about isolation, selfhood, and the impacts of the First World War, as a young man sneaks onto an Antarctic adventure. Jonathan Morgan stows away on the ship of famous adventurer James ‘Australis’ Randall, hoping to chase the Antarctic dreams of his two older brothers who died in the war. With the support of family friend Harry, he has to prove himself amongst the ship’s men, but as they reach their destination and disaster strikes, the crew find themselves fighting to survive the Antarctic winter in a place that seems beyond all maps, and fighting against a force that wants them dead.

Historical adventure isn’t a genre I would usually read, but the horror elements and trans man protagonist drew me in, and I’m glad they did. This was an incredibly eerie read, deeply immersive and haunted not only by a supernatural force and Antarctic isolation, but the profound impact of the First World War upon those who survived it. Split into sections based on the expedition, the novel starts slowly, building up a picture of the characters and the plans before things start to go very wrong. I did find it hard to keep up with the large cast of characters early on, maybe because this isn’t the sort of narrative I’d usually read, but I managed to keep up enough to still enjoy it, and slowly some of the main characters became apparent.

The horror is a clever combination of the mind and some kind of supernatural force, with ambiguity around what exactly is going on, and it really captures a terrifying sense of whether people are being driven mad by the situation or whether something is out there after them. There’s also a lot about masculinity in the book, not only through Jonathan getting to live as the gender he is, but in the ways all of the characters deal with different things, like reputation and betrayal, as well as emotion.

Set in a horrifyingly harsh landscape, All The White Spaces explores human nature whilst providing a tense, slowly-unfolding story of a fight for survival against something unknowable.

Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake

fiendfullyreading

Delilah Green Doesn’t Care is a queer romcom about a woman who has to return to her hometown for her estranged stepsister’s wedding. Delilah lives in New York City, trying to make it in the world of photography, and staying at arms’ length from everyone. When her stepsister Astrid, who she’s never gotten along with and tries to avoid speaking to, asks her to be the photographer for her wedding, Delilah needs the money, so she finds herself back in Bright Falls, facing memories of her father’s death. At the same time, Astrid’s best friend Claire is trying to manage co-parenting with her ex and keeping Astrid happy during her wedding. When Claire and Delilah run into each other after years, sparks start to fly.

This is a romcom that deals with quite a lot of character stuff whilst also building up the romance, especially around Delilah and Astrid coming to terms with their childhood and how they see each other, and Claire working out how to put herself first and give her almost-teenage daughter (and previously unreliable ex) room to grow. The premise is a classic romantic comedy one, with someone forced back into a place they left for a wedding, and some pre-wedding activities giving structure and chances for the protagonists to see each other. The chapters move between the two main characters, giving both perspectives, and Delilah in particular is a flawed character, too quick to just try and get a rise out of someone rather than really engage, and who has to learn to give people another chance.

I particularly liked the way that Delilah built up a connection with Claire’s daughter, teaching her about photography, as it made the book feel like it wasn’t an ‘oh, also I’ve got a child’, but the love interest actively taking an interest in them. Astrid’s fiancé being terrible, and therefore the wedding that sets up the plot being a bad idea, is a classic trope, and the book, perhaps unexpectedly from the premise which might sound like it’s more of a ‘character escapes from conservative little town and has to go back’, shows queer characters realistically uniting to help stop the awful cishet guy. There’s a few questionable actions by characters which aren’t really dealt with, but that tends to be true of most romcoms, which typically need to be read with a dose of ‘that was discussed properly by the characters later’.

With a sequel about Astrid on the way for people who want more of these characters, Delilah Green Doesn’t Care is a fun romcom about two women reaching their thirties and working out where they are and what they want next. It’s easy to get gripped by it and stay up too late reading it, which tends to feel like the mark of a good romcom novel, and the chemistry is good. A book that does what it says on the tin, whilst letting the characters be vulnerable and grow.