Tag: books

Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak

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Bridge of Clay is the story of five brothers and five animals, told non-chronologically as one of them, Clay, must build a bridge. The Dunbar brothers live, fight, and grieve together, living without parents but with a selection of animals including a mule called Achilles. When their estranged father who disappeared walks back into their house and asks who will help him build a bridge, only Clay accepts. Tied up in Clay’s mind is love and sadness, and a burning sense of what happened to his mother. Matthew Dunbar, the responsible one, narrates the story of the brothers and their parents from past to present.

The novel is written in Zusak’s memorable style, weaving in ideas of storytelling and repeated motifs and wordplay as well as a lot of Homer references. It is long and perhaps a little confusing at first, but once you’ve got used to the timeline and characters, it becomes a lot more rewarding. Many of the characters are intriguing and unusual, particularly the boys’ mother Penelope and Clay himself, though some of the brothers feel less sketched out than others. The relationships in the book are equally compelling, with a lot left to inference rather than stated. It is a novel to think about, both whilst reading and afterwards (which is unsurprising to anyone who has read Zusak’s earlier The Book Thief).

Bridge of Clay is an unusual novel that plays with storytelling and unreliability, but at its heart is about a dysfunctional family and the impact of how they all cope with tragedy. It frequently makes the reader think and keeps ambiguity even through its detail; it’s less of a light read and more something to get stuck into.

The Corset by Laura Purcell

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The Corset is a gothic historical novel that unfolds a strange narrative of a girl who seems to be able to kill with a needle and thread, and the woman who visits her in prison and hears her story. Dorothea is a young, fairly well-off Victorian woman whose now-dead mother instilled a belief in charitable work in her. During her visits to Oakgate Prison she meets Ruth Butterham, a sixteen-year-old girl accused of murder. Dorothea wants to test her theory about the shape of a person’s skull determining their life and morality, and Ruth seems perfect. Instead, Ruth starts telling her story and Dorothea finds her belief stretched and a chilling connection with her own life.

Purcell’s The Silent Companions was a creepy tale of a young widow, but The Corset goes even further to create a classic gothic story that highlights injustice and being a victim through the use of menace and possible unexplainable phenomena. Moving between the perspectives of Dorothea as she visits Ruth and considers marriage to escape her father, and Ruth’s story of the strange power of her sewing allows for Purcell to highlight the similarities and differences between the two women. Madness, revenge, and different kinds of imprisonment run throughout the narrative and it also plays with perspective, leading to a satisfying ending again in a classic gothic style.

The Corset feels like a natural successor to late eighteenth and early nineteenth gothic novels in its combination of a strange unfolding narrative of death and revenge and its use of this narrative to expose oppression, imprisonment, and kinds of oppression. It is likely to be another popular gothic read from Purcell, with hints of Sarah Waters’ Affinity in subject matter and a main character whose name makes it impossible not to think of Middlemarch.

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

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Ghost Wall is a subtle and unnerving novel about a girl forced into a summer of experimental archeology by her abusive father. Sylvie is seventeen and is spending her summer at a recreated Iron Age camp in Northumbria, as her father—who is obsessed with recreating the hardship of Iron Age life—works with an archeology professor and some students to live like people might have in the past. Sylvie and her mother live in the shadow of her father and his anger and rules, but in the heat of the summer and the bare landscape near Hadrian’s Wall, his beliefs might be turned into something else, something inspired by the bog girls who were forced into sacrifice many years ago.

This is a short novel that creates a strange and tense atmosphere through description and detail. Sylvie’s life is depicted through her perspective of the events at the camp and how she knows about foraging and survival, in contrast to the three students who are on the trip. Moss weaves in tensions around misogyny and class to the narrative, which is centred around abuse by those closest to you. At the same time, it is about Sylvie being aware that there is more to life that what her father is trying to force her to be, hints of coming of age with the backdrop of an unusual and difficult childhood.

Ghost Wall is a compact novel that tells a small story featuring a small cast of characters staying in a camp in the wilderness. It also spans many hundreds of years, telling a story of force and coercion that hasn’t changed much. Its structure—short and descriptive with a sudden conclusion—might not appeal to everyone, but this is one for people who are interested in trying to know the past, but also depict a more modern day experience in fiction.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

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Normal People is a novel about complicated connections, feelings, class, and modern millennial life. Marianne and Connell grew up in the same small town in Ireland, seemingly very different people. But they start to connect, and then when they end up going to the same university in Dublin, their complicated relationship continues to weave its way around their lives and their own personal issues.

The third person narrative moves between Connell and Marianne’s point of view, sometimes to devastating effect as it displays tiny misunderstandings in their relationship and how people, even those who feel deeply connected, can talk and act at cross purposes. The chapters jump forward in time, giving the length of time between each part in a way that feels strangely conversational and real. As with Rooney’s earlier Conversations with Friends, the narrative is mostly focused on interpersonal relationships, arguments, and detail about human emotion and messed up people. Underneath is a strong current of class, money, and politics, as well as mental health.

Again, like Rooney’s debut novel, Normal People is a book about millennials that will appeal to millennials, or at least a book about being flawed and moving from your late teens to early twenties without direction. It is a melancholy book, but also one that makes you hope for better communication, for the world to be better.

The Incendiaries by R. O. Kwon

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The Incendiaries is a complex, compulsive novel about faith, love, and extremism in a prestigious university. Will Kendall—awkward scholarship student who has transferred from Bible college—meets Phoebe Lin, a glamorous Korean American girl who is secretly racked with guilt about her mother’s death. Will falls in love with Phoebe, but Phoebe is being drawn into the orbit of John Leal, a former student with a complex past involving North Korea. Leal has started a Christian group and Phoebe is looking for something to belief in. Will starts to see that the group is a cult with fundamentalist concerns, but his attempts to save Phoebe expose his own flaws and issues with his own Christian past.

At its heart, The Incendiaries is a love story about extremism told by an unreliable narrator. Will and Phoebe’s relationship is depicted in a careful, engrossing way, showing the unhealthiness and the way that Will purposefully ignores this. The unreliable narration is key, showing how Will puts his faith in Phoebe and how he blinds himself to his own actions. Though the novel is quite short, the fundamentalist cult is a slow burner, giving it extra ominousness. Alongside this, R. O. Kwon focuses on sexual assault on university campuses, abortion protests, and North Korean prisoners, making the book a complex one that shows how these issues do not exist in a vacuum.

At the start, The Incendiaries feels very similar to The Secret History, with a lying narrator dealing with bigger things at a prestigious university. However, what it turns into is something else, a powerful novel that shows flawed people and dangerous issues set mostly within the bounds of the campus.

The Monsters We Deserve by Marcus Sedgwick

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The Monsters We Deserve is an act of literary criticism wrapped up as a short gothic horror novel, in which an author staying in the Alps and obsessed with his dislike of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein starts to question the line between creator and monster. It is written in a distinctive, immediate style, trying to capture a sense of the unnerving remote location and the lingering ghosts of author and character. Indeed, the atmosphere is one of its strengths, as the combination of spooky and experimental gives it a frenzied edge, making it difficult to tell what, in the context of the narrative, is real or imagined.

It is the literary criticism part that confuses it. The narrator’s hatred for Frankenstein feels at odds with the fact that the novel is likely to appeal to people with an interest in Shelley’s book, no matter how much of a plot device it is. There is also something about the way the narrator (who is framed as Sedgwick himself) directs a lot of his hatred onto Mary Shelley and her failings (to go too far into the weird dynamic here would be to give spoilers, though). Most people would be likely to agree with the importance of creation and responsibility in Frankenstein that the narrator must strive to prove is the ‘meaning’ of it, though this is at least partly framed as unaccepted.

For a book about creation and imagination, it seems very willing to give definitive views on both the novel and the historical writers it talks about. The manner in which in the novel literary criticism becomes a definite act and one centred around authorial intention must be interpreted through the lens of the metafictional elements of the book in order to see beyond the narrator’s opinionated stance. Indeed, it can feel like arguing with the narrator is the only way to engage with the idea of authors creating monsters they cannot control.

As an eerie short novel with a metafictional side, The Monsters We Deserve does pretty well. There is a lot left unsaid in between the lines, which matches up with the narrator’s reluctance to tell the full truth about his previous horror writing and with the mysterious and unexplained elements in the narrative. However, as a novel engaging with Frankenstein, it is disappointing.

That’s Not What Happened by Kody Keplinger

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That’s Not What Happened is a powerful and relevant YA novel about the aftermath of a school shooting. Lee is one of the survivors of the Virgil County High School Massacre, but her best friend Sarah was killed. The story is famous: Sarah died with a cross necklace, proclaiming her faith. But Lee knows that this isn’t the truth, and she realises that she wants to set the record straight. As she talks to her fellow survivors, she sees that everyone saw different things on that day and maybe telling the truth isn’t as simple as it sounds.

It isn’t difficult to tell that this is a hard-hitting novel that looks at trauma and how people react to traumatic events differently, as well as how a small town might deal with a terrible event. That’s Not What Happened is also a story about characters: a diverse group of people and their lives, not only in relation to the shooting. There is also a fair amount of emphasis on their stories before the shooting, showing how the media image is often slanted or wrong. An important element of the novel is the fact that it never names the shooter, in contrast to real life media reports which often fixate on the personal details of the shooter. As Lee points out in her first person narrative, people often focus on the shooter, particularly those who become obsessed with the events. By resolutely making the focus on the survivors and the victims, Keplinger challenges this, focusing on how the stories of the people caught up in the tragedy aren’t always as simple as the media presents them.

This is a novel that represents a school shooting and the PTSD and other issues caused by surviving one in a powerful way, but also in a way that focuses on people and their lives and quirks. It is another young adult book that actively engages with the modern world, touching not only on the major topics around the shooting, but also on alcohol abuse, sexuality, disability, and family issues.

The Adults by Caroline Hulse

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The Adults is a quirky and humorous novel about the complications of life and the reality of trying to act like grown ups. Matt and Claire are split up, but they want their daughter Scarlett to have a good family Christmas. This means that somehow they end up at a holiday camp over the festive period with their new partners in tow, and Scarlett’s imaginary rabbit friend Posey coming along too. Everyone might think it’s a weird set up, but they’re all going to be adults about it, or so they think until it ends up with a phone call to the police.

The novel opens with the phone call and then tells the story of the characters getting there and having their holiday together intercut with witness statements, as the truth of the incident and what happened beforehand slowly comes out. The narrative isn’t hugely surprising, though it is nice that this isn’t just an ‘exes get back together’ type story. Instead, it is funny and slightly dark, with a lot of the comedy coming from the ridiculous awkwardness of the situation and the inclusion of Scarlett’s imaginary giant rabbit, as a group of people with a lot of differences and complicated personal ties try to get along amidst fights and lies. At times it can feel a bit slow, but it picks up the pace later on once the groundwork is laid down.

The Adults is a light read that can be sweet and also embarrassing, showing how bizarre life can be when some well-meaning adults make stupid choices to try and make a child happy over Christmas. It is the kind of book that would make a good indie comedy film adaptation, with a slightly surreal imaginary friend and a kind of ‘look how awful someone else’s Christmas could be’ vibe.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

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My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a clever and strangely hypnotic novel about a woman who goes into a narcotic-induced sleep-haze for a year. The narrator is privileged and empty; her Upper East Side apartment is paid for and she can use the rent from her parents’ old house to cover her bills. So, aided by a terrible psychiatrist who will prescribe her anything for her supposed insomnia, she goes to sleep. For a year, she endeavours to wake only when necessary, to live by routine, seeing only the guys at the bodega and occasionally the best friend she mostly dislikes.

Moshfegh’s style is fascinating, drawing the reader into the narrator’s strange world and mindset, seeing only what she sees upon waking. As might be expected from a novel mostly about someone trying to sleep away life, there isn’t a huge amount of narrative, but that is the point, and the immediate concerns of the narrator become the drama of the novel. Underneath are flashes of New York in 2000 and 2001: politics, 9/11, a depressing world of diets and art fads. At times it feels like other novels written around that time, using a character’s shocking use of various prescription drugs to enforce sleep to show the extremes of escaping society, but it also feels different, focused very much on the narrator and less on mocking the culture around her. And in this current world in 2018 of unceasing news updates and social media, the idea of sleeping to escape it all makes even more sense.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a darkly comic, downright weird novel that takes the trope of a main character withdrawing from the world and turns it into a purposeful retreat into narcotic oblivion. It mustn’t be written off as yet another New York novel, as it is really about withdrawing from the city, withdrawing from the outside world, and being self-obsessed in a self-destructive seeming way that may just be a rebirth.

Floored by Sara Barnard, Holly Bourne, Tanya Byrne, Non Pratt, Melinda Salisbury, Lisa Williamson  & Eleanor Wood

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Floored is the story of six people who meet by chance in a lift at a TV centre, and a seventh person who changes their lives by being there. Dawson, Kaitlyn, Velvet, Sasha, Joe, and Hugo have their lives changed by a traumatic experience they all go through, one which causes them to meet every year. Through friendships, relationships, and a Whatsapp group, the six of them change and grow over the following six years, showing that coincidence can bring people together and life is about chance and consequence.

This collaborative novel between seven YA writers tells the perspective of each of the six main characters and a mysterious narrator who brings each section together at the end. Though written by so many voices, it feels very much like an integrated whole. The characters’ lives are varied and show different elements of life aged fifteen to twenty-one. There are issues of class, disability, money, sexuality, relationships, friendships, alcohol, and more, all brought together by the narratives of the six characters. It is particularly good at tackling class issues in the UK and how disability (in this case, visual impairment) is treated by well-meaning friends.

Floored is an unputdownable YA read, urging the reader to find out what happens to the characters as each year passes. It shows how friendships aren’t perfect, and sometimes people have to be self-centred, but that it is also good to have people who have got your back.