Tag: books

The Chosen Ones by Scarlett Thomas

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Charming sequel in this bookish magical children’s series: The Chosen Ones by Scarlett Thomas

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The Chosen Ones is the second book in Scarlett Thomas’ Worldquake children’s fantasy series. It follows Effie Truelove and her friends Maximilian, Wolf, Raven, and Lexy, all of whom have different magical abilities following the ‘worldquake’ that made magical seep into the world they know. Effie is now able to travel into the Otherworld, where she wants to know more about the magical books that have so far impacted her and her friends’ destiny, and her friend Maximilian dreams of visiting the dark Underworld to see what lies there. But when both of them disappear, the other three realise something must be wrong. Soon they are all fighting a devious plot that relates to being the Last Reader of a book, something which holds huge magical power.

The book is as charming as the first in the series, Dragon’s Green. The emphasis on the importance of reading, books, and personal ability and individuality makes the series feel distinctive, whilst the quirkiness of the characters and scenarios (for example, magically powered tennis matches between Effie and Wolf and the strange pupils from a rival school) will appeal to children’s imaginations. The Chosen Ones combines various good and nefarious magical plots and jumps between the five main characters as well as some smaller ones, meaning that it is fast paced and doesn’t get boring.

Anyone who enjoyed Dragon’s Green will be pleased with this next instalment, which ups the drama and gives more information about the world of Effie and her friends. Despite being aimed at older children, the series has plenty of appeal for being read together with parents, or even adults picking it up themselves (there is, for example, a reference to Barthes’ famous ‘death of the author’ essay which is unlikely to be picked up by 11-year-olds). It will be good to see what Thomas does with future books in the series, particularly with the main characters who’ve not yet had as much focus as Effie and Maximilian.

Circe by Madeline Miller

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Circe is a retelling of Greek mythology full of storytelling, magic, and female power in the face of mockery and banishment. After having rewritten Homer’s Iliad in The Song of Achilles, Miller turns to his Odyssey for this novel, with Circe as main character. Born to the sun god Helios and a naiad, Circe is an outsider from her birth with a strange voice and yellow eyes. Her siblings mock her and her prospects don’t even stretch as far as becoming a wife. When she meets a handsome young fisherman, Glaucus, she meddles in his life to try and suit herself, but gods and mortals don’t mix, and soon Circe is discovering more about herself, power she did not know she had, and it sets her on the way to becoming the witch of the island Aiaia.

Miller has written an intricate novel, tying together many classical stories through the perspective of Circe, including that of her sister Pasiphae and her infamous time married to Minos, and Circe’s encounters with the hero Odysseus. Her ostracised position means that though these stories are shown first hand, many others are told to her as tales or given as answers to her enquiries about those she once knew. The effect is a weaving together of stories, particularly for readers who know only some bits of Greek mythology, and overall it works well to give not only Circe’s story, but new perspectives on other tales too.

The novel starts fairly slowly and covers a lot of ground as her immortal lifespan allows the narrative to keep progressing. This does mean that it can be difficult to get into at first, but once Circe is on Aiaia the book blooms into the tale of a woman who carves her own place, both physically and using magic and power, in a world that seemed to be against her. In particular, Miller highlights the tension between gods and mortals, not only as separate entities, but within individuals.

Circe is a different beast to The Song of Achilles, focused on female power and nature rather than the battles of the Trojan war, but it does have similar themes of love and loss, plus questions of mortality and remembrance. As a character, Circe is given an agency not always found in tales of male heroes and many readers will find this a refreshing take on the Odyssey (though it is likely others will question Miller’s choices regarding the variable interpretations of these stories).

Quick book picks for March

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The weather hasn’t exactly become Spring-like yet and though I did tire of seeing endless ‘Snow day? Read one of our newly published books’ tweets (this may have been because I was at work), that was also the only idea I had for introducing this month’s new books. A rich bunch this month, with links to full reviews as usual (if you like short/flash/‘damp gothic’ fiction, I advise you to not skip past Mayhem & Death).

  • Sal by Mick Kitson – A different kind of wilderness survival story, this novel follows two sisters who escape their mum’s abusive boyfriend by following survival tips that Sal, the elder sister, learnt off YouTube. Powerful with a vivid voice.
  • The End of Loneliness by Benedict Wells – Translated from German into English, this book travels across Germany, France, and Switzerland to show snapshots from the often melancholy lives of three siblings in a film-like way.
  • Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala – A memorable and timely novel about telling the truth, friendship, race, and sexuality. Niru is a top student at his Washington D.C. school, but he’s keeping a secret from his attentive and proud parents, and when they find out he is gay, the fallout will change everything.
  • The Zero and the One by Ryan Ruby – A literary thriller set between Oxford, Berlin, and New York, this has dashes of The Secret History, Patricia Highsmith, and the Netflix series The Good Place and will appeal to those who like dark fiction centred around intellectual obsession and twisted relationships.
  • Mayhem & Death by Helen McClory – A collection of short pieces of writing and one novella which are filled with mystery, sea, birds, gothic, and irregularity. Read for the atmosphere, a fantastic poem about loneliness, and the sense of short writing that is exciting and fresh.
  • The Trick To Time by Kit de Waal – After My Name Is Leon, it was exciting to see another novel by Kit de Waal; this one focuses on grief and life spanning across decades that will appeal to fans of everyday character-led fiction.

The Zero and the One by Ryan Ruby

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The Zero and the One is a novel about intellect, questioning morality, and how people can be pawns in a larger game. Owen is an Oxford fresher from a working class background who, feeling lonely and out of place anywhere other than stuck into his work, ends up befriending a visiting student who believes they have a similar mindset for discussing philosophy. However, Zachary Foedern is more complicated than Owen first thought, constantly trying to defy convention, and their friendship lasts barely more than a term before Zach proposes his greatest transgression yet: a suicide pact.

The novel moves between Owen in the aftermath of Zach’s plans and showing Owen and Zach as friends, from meeting until ending. The narrative is unfurled like a mystery, though it is not a hugely surprising one, not even as Owen gets to know Zach’s twin sister Vera who he never met during their time at Oxford. The ultimate denouement is definitely set up, but this seems to work with Owen as a clever and also short-sighted narrator caught in this dark, recognisably literary fiction world.

The earlier narrative is more centred around students obsessed with their intellectual quest: in this case, an obscure philosopher and questions about the morality of suicide, with an Oxford and Berlin backdrop. The later plot, with Owen in New York, feels quite different, with hints of a mystery and a fish-out-of-water Englishman in America vibe. This variation can be a bit strange: it feels like a mixture of The Secret History, the Netflix series ‘The Good Place’, a dash of Brideshead, and maybe a bit of Nabokov too. The Oxford parts were surprisingly decent with only the odd jarringly Americanised detail, though the Berlin trip felt too fleeting.

The Zero and the One is clearly trying to be a certain kind of book, a literary thriller type with intellectual obsession and dark characters hiding secrets. At times it pulls this off better than others, but it still makes for an intriguing read.

Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala

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Sexuality, race, and best friends: Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala

Speak No Evil is a powerful and gripping novel about speaking the truth and escaping being confined by others’ words. Niru is a top student and runner at his private school in Washington DC with a place at Harvard when he leaves. His Nigerian parents are attentive and protective, but Niru must keep a secret from them: he is gay. Only his best friend Meredith knows. But when his father founds out the truth, Niru faces brutal fallout and his friendship with Meredith suffers too. The aftereffects build things towards a terrible event that will be misunderstood by most people.

This is a novel about how sexuality and race intersect in a multitude of ways. Niru is a brilliant central character, trying to fight and appease his parents at once and to reconcile various aspects of his identity and personality. His friendship with Meredith forms an important part of the narrative and also a way of showing how even friends can not understand the problems caused by having conflicting elements of life and identity.

The narrative propels you forward and the book shows the violence surrounding people, particularly non-white LGBT people, and how it can erode a sense of self. This is a hard-hitting and relevant novel with a vividly depicted protagonist.

On Deaths of the Poets, interest in dead poets, and trying to be a live one

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As an undergrad English student, I definitely lost time after searching online for lists of the deaths of famous writers. Some of them are quite weird or horribly fitting, others infamous or still blunt. In Deaths of the Poets, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts travel through the deaths of poets to consider the image of the poet as a dangerous vocation, where mortality seems to be the price paid for creation. They literally travel, indeed, around the death places of many major poets from Chatterton in the late eighteenth century to some who have died in the twenty-first, making the book part-travelogue, part literary history, and part-musing on being a poet.

It is a morbid whistle-stop tour in many ways, with the chapters organised by theme (and ‘theme’ is mostly related to their deaths) and thus jumping across time and place, particularly across the Atlantic. They concentrate on famous British and American poets writing in English, so their travelling features more than its fair share of New York (and a strange trip to my hometown thanks to John Clare). The book is, almost as a side effect, a useful way of gaining some knowledge of a lot of famous poets from the past two hundred years in a concise way (a bit like reading Wikipedia pages to find out how they died).

More than that, the authors are trying to examine the image of the dying poet, the post-Chatterton post-Romantic of a poet going out in an often troubled, possibly drunken blaze. They cover poets who famously died young—John Keats being high on the list, also war poets and others—and those who actually lived out a fairly long life. The answer to the question ‘is it a myth?’ is inconclusive by the end, but it was never really a scientific endeavour.

Deaths of the Poets is written by two poets and part of its work is a consideration of being a poet, in a historically-facing way. There are some offhand claims that poets don’t use Twitter or are somehow caught in the past, which is unfair to plenty of technology-embracing poets and poetry fans who also like old poetry. Perhaps it is difficult to reconcile the image of long-gone poets stuck in their time and modern, technological ways people can be still enjoying them (or Googling their deaths). The internet has made literary pilgrimages of the type the book’s authors embark on much easier: simply search online and you’ll find websites telling you the right house to stand outside or (this is very much from personal experience) exactly how to find John Thelwall’s grave in Bath.

The book has an underlying message about the humanness of the physical deaths of poets and the focus on details of their writing and non-writing lives that feels slightly at odds with its comments about poets today, an image which does seem to imply poetry writing is specific to an exclusive group of people stuck somewhat in the past. As someone who both loves a number of long-dead poets and has seen how trying to get into writing poetry and hoping for poems to be published is an off-putting and often inaccessible place, these moments felt a little off.

As with many books that cover a lot of different bits of literary history, this one works well as a primer on the stories of a lot of big name poets, with the opportunity for those who know more about a writer to get frustrated at elements of their presentation. It is a reminder of our fascination with the lives of these notable few and the almost mythical position they can hold in cultural consciousness, without consideration of greater depth. However, maybe it needs to demythologise the figure of the poet a little more. As it points out, they’re just people who lived and died like anyone else.

The End of Loneliness by Benedict Wells

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Messed up family story: The End of Loneliness by Benedict Wells (translated by Charlotte Collins)

The End of Loneliness is a melancholy yet hopeful novel about family, loss, and the way life turns out. Jules and his siblings Marty and Liz have their lives shattered by the unexpected death of their parents and suddenly find themselves at a state-run boarding school. Their lives diverge as they deal with the past in different ways. Meanwhile, Jules meets a girl in his class, Alva, who has a mystery surrounding her, but doesn’t quite realise how he feels about her until it is too late. As they all grow up, their ties are tested and they cannot always escape the spectre of loss and loneliness.

The novel, translated into English from German, is set across Germany, France, and Switzerland as the narrative jumps time to show the fragmented lives of Jules and his brother and sister. The stories Wells tells are simple and emotional, showing the relentless ups and downs of live whether they are large or small. Jules is a lost man who came from a promising, vivacious child, and as the narrator he keeps the melancholy tone running throughout. Hindsight is used quite sparingly and thus to good effect, used as a reminder of the ways the future affects the past and how it is remembered.

The End of Loneliness is an understated novel that feels almost like a film at times, caught in snapshots of life. It has a particular sadness about it, though it isn’t necessarily a sad book, and it depicts a complex sibling relationship that gives its main characters a chance to strengthen their bonds as well as drift apart. It is likely to be a hidden gem for readers looking for literary fiction with a heartfelt narrative.

Sal by Mick Kitson

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Engaging modern wilderness survival novel with heart: Sal by Mick Kitson

Sal is a touching and distinctive novel about two sisters trying to survive in rural Scotland. Sal prepared for a long time for her escape into the wilderness with her little sister Peppa: watching YouTube videos, reading the SAS survival handbook, and getting supplies and tools from Amazon using stolen cards. Robert, her mum’s abusive boyfriend, didn’t notice the missing cards. Now Sal must use her knowledge of building shelter and skinning rabbits to look after Peppa, now that she’s freed her sister from the dangers of Robert. Just as long as nobody works out where they are and wants to split them up.

The novel is written from Sal’s point of view and creates a vivid sense of her voice and thoughts. She is a character who shows the force of sibling love and protectiveness, but at the same time, Sal and Peppa aren’t cloying or annoying, but real siblings who tease each other and have different interests and strengths. The narrative is made up of the minutiae of their wilderness life as well as larger things that threaten to change it, and it provides a tense atmosphere at times, as it is clear it will be hard for them to go on as they are.

Sal has some similarities to Emma Donoghue’s Room though the premise is fairly opposite, as it uses a distinctive character voice to show a fraught situation become normal. Its writing style makes it easy to get invested in the sisters and it is certainly an enjoyable and gripping read, though a little slower at parts. It is deeply set in its Scottish location, both the wilderness and the scheme where Sal and Peppa escaped from, and is an exciting new novel with heart.

Quick book picks for February

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Escape the bleakness of February with some new books. Many of my choices are tackling some hard-hitting subjects in varied and interesting ways. Titles link to full reviews as usual.

  • The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara – A raw novel about LGBT life in NYC from the 1970s to the 1990s that weaves together characters whilst placing them firmly in real LGBT history (a good pick for February being UK LGBT History Month).
  • The Hoarder by Jess Kidd – The story of a woman who works as a carer for an eccentric old man and is drawn into the mystery surrounding him in his weird house.
  • Restless Souls by Dan Sheehan – A road trip tragicomedy about friends dealing with PTSD, war, and traumatic childhood events, which often feels like a specific kind of indie film.
  • Home by Amanda Berriman – This novel about the housing crisis and sexual assault told from the point of view of a four-year-old is a tough but also sweet look at life using a distinctive voice.
  • Eat Up by Ruby Tandoh – A quirky book about food and eating, with a style that won’t suit everyone but will appeal to Tandoh’s many Twitter fans.

Restless Souls by Dan Sheehan

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PTSD tragicomedy: Restless Souls by Dan Sheehan

Restless Souls is a novel that combines a road trip narrative, PTSD treatment, tough upbringings in Dublin, loss, and the hope of unlikely cures as longtime friends Karl, Baz, and Tom try and work through their pasts and present. Tom’s desire to be a war correspondent led him to Sarajevo, but when he returned, he came back haunted and suffering from PTSD. His old friends Karl and Baz aren’t sure what to do, but they’re willing to try out an experimental clinic halfway round the world in California, and so the three of them depart Ireland to see if they can find a desperate solution to help Tom.

The novel feels similar to a certain kind of comedy-drama film where friends must confront their past in a road trip type setting. However, what makes Sheehan’s version of the story distinctive is his focus upon PTSD and suicide through Tom and through their childhood friend Gabriel, which makes the characters’ journey a necessity rather than an indulgence (as can often be the case in a road trip drama narrative). Elements of the genre are apparent—arguments, revelations, a lack of belief in the point of their journey—but the novel also does not only focus on the journey, but what happens whilst there and what happened when Tom was in Bosnia. The narrative moves at quite a fast pace but slows down for Karl’s remembrances, a style that may make it less engaging for some but which tends to suit the story.

Restless Souls mixes hard-hitting moments with light banter and reminiscence in a way that doesn’t undercut its serious themes, but gives a kind of black comedy often found in life.