Book Review: The Future Tense of Joy by Jessica Teich

Note: I got this book as an advanced reading copy from Netgalley, but you can read it in September 2016.

So, this book made me cry.

It was in the last quarter, when Jessica intervenes in a issue her daughter is having with a schoolmate. The school has a word, the crisis is averted, and her daughter goes back to being a happy, if somewhat pensive, child.
“It was that simple,” says Teich, “That’s how easily someone could have saved me…”

And I cried, because like Teich, like many women who have been abused, I realised it could have been that easy for me to be saved too. And it stings that no one did.

This is not a novel about abuse necessarily, although Teich does go into her history in depth (abusive boyfriend, absent mother). It’s a story about a woman who sees the world she’s trying to desperately to mould into perfect safety slowly eroding away. Late at night, questioning her choices as she navigates family life, Teich picks up a decade old obituary and sees a kindred spirit in the dead girl, Lacey. Both high achievers, Rhode scholars, women with difficult relationships with their mothers – how is Teich in this life, with her daughters and a husband who adores her, and Lacey in the ground after committing suicide at 27?

The novel then rambles through Teich’s search to uncover Lacey’s life. She contacts Lacey’s family and friends, trying to get a sense of her and trying to uncover what drove her to such a drastic act. At the same time, Teich uncovers more and more of her own life, explaining and exploring her neuroses using Lacey’s life as a mirror.

Some of the writing here is just beautiful. Poignant, reflexive and heartfelt, Teich treats Lacey as a beloved sister. Her love for her children shines, and her pain at not feeling the connection to her family that she craves is exquisitely written in.
That said, the book goes on way too long. The whole last section could be easily removed without losing any of the story. The story about Angelia is pretty, but I really don’t see how it fits in with the surrounding story – if it had been woven in better, introduced earlier it may have worked, but it’s like a story that’s been added later to drive home a point, and it’s quite jarring. The parts about her travelling back to Oxford could have been more succinct, because again, a lot of the conversations she has seem to be added to just reinforce what the book is about.

I feel like a lot of the present day autobiographical content is very self indulgent. Yes, memoir is by definition indulgent, but not THIS indulgent. It’s as if Teich wants applause for working out her demons, returning to her husband, learning to release her vice-grip on her children, and learning to live her life despite the abuse she suffered as a teen. But she doesn’t need to ask for accolade. A lot of women (and men, i guess) who want to read this understand implicitly how hard it is to love and be loved after abuse. How hard it is to let children out into a world that is inherently unsafe. How guilty not being happy with a life that looks perfect on paper makes you feel. Just saying ‘here’s my history, here’s my demons, here’s what I’ve done’ would have been good enough. And made for a book that didn’t drag at the tail end.

The writing style nearly makes up for it. But not quite. However, this would have been an extremely difficult book to write (and harder yet to release into the world), and I have to give Teich props for handling the subject matter with poise and delicacy. At no point did I feel her inclusion of Lacey was voyeuristic or macabre (and I’m pretty sure Lacey’s family felt the same). She shows her daughters in a way that demonstrates her absolute devotion, but doesn’t make them larger (or more perfect) than life. She handles delicate, uncertain and painful topics with grace, and there should be more books that talk about this stuff.

3/5 stars.

 

Book Review: The Signal Flame by Andrew Krivák

Note: I received this book as an advanced reading copy from netgalley. You can read it in January 2017.

I didn’t expect to enjoy this book, but I ended up reading it over an evening and part of the next morning. It’s slow and steadfast, more a sense of time passing and life being lived than building up to anything. I HATED the ending, but only because i like things to be wrapped in neat packages. The ending instead just kind of stops, in the middle of a life, which is where the story starts so I supposed was to be expected.

The story, beginning with the death of his grandfather, is about Bo, a second generation Pennsylvanian Slovak who lives with his widowed mother, Hannah, on a farm near a small town. Bo runs the local mill and waits for his missing war veteran brother to return home. His brother’s fiancee also waits, now heavily pregnant. An accident in a terrible flood sees Bo, Ruth and Hannah living together in the house, trying to work through the problems the past has left them.

This story is about family history and legacy; those parts which must be endured and those parts that can be changed as people move on. Krivák has written a gorgeous novel, where each characters voice comes through strongly (even Jozef Vinich, who the reader never encounters alive, and Sam, who is MIA throughout the story). Each character is beautifully rounded and human, even the dog is honestly and sweetly rendered (who wouldn’t love a black lab called Beautiful in Slovak?).

The story is mostly from the point of view of Bo, but told in the third person, so you get occasional glimpses into the mind of Hannah (struggling to reconcile the loss of her husband with her affection for his killer’s daughter), and Ruth (shattered by her life, but ready to move on). There are memory pieces throughout which add to the story really well, especially Hannah’s memory of Sam drowning the hornets nest. I really enjoy this style of writing, where most of the story takes place in the present, but there is still that tie to the past (the birth of Bexhet, the buying of land from Augustin, Tomás becoming a priest) woven in.

All in all, if you have any ties to Slovakia or Pennsylvania, an interest in life in small town America during the Vietnam War, or a love for slow burn storytelling, you will like this book. You may possibly even like the open-ended ending, although I didn’t.

 

3.5/5

Book Review: Marigny Street by Annie Rose Welch

Note: I got this book as an advance reading copy from Netgalley.

I kinda of read this by mistake. It was advertised as a fantasy book, which is a legitimate genre given it features an angel, but it’s so much more a romance than anything else. And I don’t do well with romance – they make me uncomfortable. Anything more romantic or sexy than J D Robb’s In Death books and I’m cringing in my seat with a bad taste in my mouth.

I have issues, I know, and not just because I LOOOOOOVE the In Death series. Roll on September!

Anyway, this is the story of a character so forgettable that almost immediately I forgot her name and I had to look it up. It’s Evangeline. And that name is pretty unique, so it demonstrates further how forgettable her story is if I blocked that out. Evangeline’s life is a bit of a mess since she lost her son – her marriage is pretty much over, her boss doesn’t really want her there, her family are worried about her absentmindedness and she just wants to sleep. But then she runs into a famous movie star, who saves her from dodgy blood sugar, and they then embark on a carefree, romantic weekend in New Orleans.

I know, right?  Maybe fantasy IS the correct genre.

So Evangeline realises that this man is the love of her life, the one she has been dreaming of since she was a wee girl living with her grandparents in the same house she now lives in alone. So there’s lots of sex, lots of heartfelt conversations and many, many declarations of love (she’s conveniently forgotten she’s married at this point, must be the humidity). Then, Gabriel has to leave and Evangeline has to make the choice to stay, or to go.

From there it gets a little hazy for me to be honest, I was just trying to finish it as fast as I could. Spoilers: Gabriel is actually an angel, sent from the future to make Evangeline realise she CAN actually be happy, despite her crappy life. All she needs is a hot man to give her a good rogering, with the potentially more rogerings in the future. OK, so it didn’t say that, but it may as well have.

Read if you love supernatural romance that’s heavy on the romance, heavy on the man-saves-girl themes, heavy on the ‘i can’t live another breath without you, the scent of your sweat on my skin completes me’ shite that makes me die a little in side. I know I sound jaded and I probably am, there’s tonnes of people who will eat this book up. I’m just very definitely not one of them. Oh and the writing is pretty stock standard and I was rooting for the girl to die of whatever fever she had, because she’s just so damn helpless.

1/5.

 

 

Book Review: the Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco

Note: This book was given to me as an advanced reading copy by Netgalley. You can read it in March 2017.

I really loved this book. It’s Asian influenced fantasy, but the Asian elements aren’t cloying – I barely even noticed them until a quarter of the way in. It’s the story of Tea (pronounced Tee-ah), who accidentally raises her brother from the dead and becomes a bone witch – equal parts revered and reviled. This story, the first of the series, deals with Tea’s training under the watchful eyes of the last remaining Bone Witch, Mykaela, and the owner of her training house, Mistress Parmina. Cue the usual coming of age stuff, Tea learns humility, hard work, the thrill of excellence, makes friends with various peeps, has a major crush on the most unavailable person she could possibly crush on, etc. It’s a fairly obvious story EXCEPT FOR THE BIT WHERE SHE KEEP RAISING THE DEAD. That’s kind of cool. And it’s woven so deftly into the story. Anyway, Tea’s training is cut short because there’s a monster that needs slaying, so off she goes.

There’s also another narrative thread, an older Tea, alone and angry on a beach surrounded by variations of said monster. She’s pissed off and she’s going to destroy the world and it’s a lovely contrast to slightly stiff, but mostly benevolent girl-child Tea, who does stuff like insist her male friend be allowed to be an Asha (an upto now wholly female calling), and make sure her exhausted, near-death mentor is safe from harm. This other thread is a bit overwrought, but still readable. Sometimes I just found it unnecessary, like the author just needed to shove an extra page of italics between chapters. The twist at the end I saw coming, but when I read it, I found myself being thrilled that I was right, rather than lamenting the obviousness – nothing about this book is obvious, even if you think it’s going to be at first.

Other reviews have lamented the long descriptions, but I totally get off on that. Remember the Bitterbynde Series, where six pages were often devoted to the description of a single plant? Yeah, I love that. So the long descriptive paragraphs here got me totally wrapped up in the world (y’all know I love good world building) and because the culture is extremely different to my own, I needed all that extra knowledge.

I really enjoyed the story, I really enjoyed the pace of the book, I really think that it will be good for adult readers and teens who are ok with dark stuff, and I hope the next one is as enjoyable.

4/5 stars.

Book Review: The Birdman’s Wife by Melissa Ashley (spoilers)

Note: I got this book as a netgalley advance copy and I’m exceedingly grateful for that.

Some of the books I get as advanced reading copies are nice. Some I can’t bear to finish. Some, I can’t put down and I want to shout about them from the rooftops. The Birdman’s Wife is one of the latter.

So while I know who the Goulds were, I have no more than a passing interest in ornithology and have never looked at their works. After reading this, I went and googled the lithographs and they are just as exquisite as the novel makes them sound. If you’re not a bird-lover, this book will make you interested in them. If you are, I imagine this book will absolutely enchant you.

It’s the story of Elizabeth Gould, a governess who meets and soon marries ornithologist John Gould, a curator and preserver at the Zoological Association of London. In 1830, John starts on a project to catalog and publish a collection of bird specimens from the Himalayas and Elizabeth agrees to do the illustration. After another four works (and six children, two of whom sadly don’t survive), Elizabeth, John and their eldest child Henry join Elizabeth’s brothers in Australia where they study and collect the local wildlife. Back in London two years (and another child) later, Elizabeth works on ‘Birds of Australia’, an epic work of 600 lithographic plates. This contribution to ornithology (including 328 new species) is what the Gould’s are most know for. Elizabeth then unfortunately dies of childbed fever shortly after the birth of her 8th child, in 1841.

That’s the basic premise of the book and outlined as such, looks stiff and boring.

Luckily, the prose is gorgeous, the flow fast paced and eager and the characters beautifully rendered. Ashley has done an amazing job of getting the reader to dive deep into Elizabeth’s world – not only do you go on her journeys with her, but you do so as an intimate friend. I felt like I was immersed in her life, following along as if Elizabeth herself was talking to me over tea (or a nice port), and the tragic ending caught me a little off guard.

But it’s not just a wonderfully written and easy to read story – it’s a very well researched work, with impeccable science to back it up. Ashley wrote the novel for her PhD, and spent four years doing the work, including becoming a volunteer taxidermist and avid birdwatcher. Science doesn’t make the book boring, instead it enriches it. I knew this was a first novel when I requested it, but Ashley writes as a master (which she indeed is, having received several awards and scholarships for her prose) and effortlessly integrates her research with her storytelling. She is currently (according to her website) researching a book on the “scandalously audacious life of a seventeenth-century French fairy tale writer” which I’m sure will be every bit as delicious as her debut.

I loved the setting of this book, early to mid 19th century Britain and Australia, and I loved even more when birds were mentioned that I knew about. I loved the diary style writing, including the daily ephemera of every day life and conversations with her husband. I loved that Ashley delves into the process of artwork, the vagaries of the muse and the excitement of new technology. I loved the dilemma of leaving her children behind, which is heartwrenching and real and beautifully written. I didn’t love that the book starts when she meets Gould, as I see that as taking some of Elizabeth’s extraordinary personhood away (although, it is called the Birdman’s Wife, so I guess it makes sense to start when she becomes that). I didn’t love that the book wasn’t a million pages longer (although I see the need to keep it under 400 pages). Also, goddammit, I didn’t love that she up and dies. It’s actually quite devastating, which shows Ashley’s skill as a writer – not only do you enter the world of the Gould’s, but you become friendly with them. You forgive John his never ending drive, seeing it as passion. You think fondly of Mary and Daisy, their devotion to Elizabeth. You look forward to seeing the children blossom and grow. And you come to love Elizabeth as a cherished friend, one whose untimely passing is deeply mourned.

To write a book based so heavily in a narrow branch of natural sciences where you still fall in love with the characters is surely the sign of an accomplished and amazing author – Melissa Ashley is certainly that.

5/5 stars

Book review: Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine

I’ve never read anything by Rachel Caine before because I’m not particularly interested in urban fantasy, and I picked this up purely because of the title. Super glad I did because I LOVED it.

Books.

Books and more books.

Books and steampunk and political intrigue that’s actually interesting and romance (and LGBTI romance without it being a BIG THING) and war and magic and learning and smuggling and drama and friendship and epic worldbuilding and a character who is just smug enough, but not too smug. Winning.

This book is about Jess, a reluctant book smuggler in alt-future London who really would rather be reading. His father sends him to apprentice at the Great Library at Alexandria (which in this world, has not only survived but now rules the world by limiting access to knowledge and outlawing the printing press) in the hopes of having a spy and ally inside the institution. This book, the first in a trilogy, tells about Jess’ time under the tutelage of the  enigmatic and harsh Proctor Wolfe, who fails students at the drop of a hat.

At the end of the training, Jess and the remaining eight students are sent to besieged Oxford on a desperate mission to save hundred of rare original books. Not everyone will make it back, but was that what the Archivist of the Library had in mind all along?

This books goes and goes. I got to the point where I was getting sad that it was going to be ending soon, then checked and I was at 48%! I love a book that gets you involved, keeps you there and then goes for a long time. There was action, adventure and death without it being super gory. I enjoyed Jess as a character (other reviews say he’s bland and forgettable, which is annoying because so many times through the book I thought “ooh, he’s totally me at 16”) and I liked the interactions between the other characters.

The worldbuilding is great, I was totally right there with them the whole way marvelling at everything. The one place where I think the book falls down is it tries to touch on everything in that world. Smugglers – tick. Various factions within the library – tick. Heretics – tick. Garda – tick. Army – tick. Librarians – tick. I think Caine would have been better off diving into just one or two elements (for this book, perhaps the smugglers and the library factions), because just glossing over the surface of what the Burners are about, or what the Librarians actually do distracts from the rest of the story and doesn’t do those groups any justice. Mention them by all means, but don’t superficially go into history/politics/etc just for the sake of ticking boxes.

Now I’m off to find and read book two, because it’s raining and stormy and awful here and I need a distraction!

 

4/5 stars

Book review: Before the Fall by Noah Hawley

I bought this thinking it was something else and read it anyway and I’m really glad I did. the storytelling was enchanting, despite the grisly subject matter, and I really enjoyed the examination of human nature at it’s best and worst.

It’s the story of Scott and it’s the story of JJ, who are thrown together in terrible circumstances. Around these two stories is built an incredibly rich world filled with well developed voices. You can hear Hawley clearly through the text, but there are subtle things that show that each segment is a story with a particular character. I really enjoy this style of writing, especially when it leaves you wanting more (and this book does).

There were slow parts and the lightly touched on political intrigue bored me shitless, as did the shock jock parts, but this is a quiet book that meanders on under suddenly you realise you can’t read fast enough because you MUST find out what happens, but at the same time you want the stories to go on developing forever.

But they can’t (mostly because – spoiler alert – nearly every character is dead), and that’s the tragedy that hits home. Most of these characters you are discovering have just had their lives cut dramatically short – there literally is no more story to tell. And at the end, when the reasoning behind the accident is shown, you realise exactly how callous and how tragic the book is.

I really liked how well developed the characters were – it was a nice and believable look into how the other 1% live – and I enjoyed the story, also totally believable. If the book is slow in parts and excruciating in others, that’s because it’s an accurate representation of life in general.

 

3/5 stars

Book review: The Girls by Emma Cline

This is one of those books that comes out of the blue and sucker punches you in the gut. Cline writes bravely, about things that are more often than not left out of ‘coming of age’ novels. Not that this is a book about coming of age. It’s so much more than that.

Evie Boyd is a bored, wiser than her years teen at the close of the 1960s, living with her newly divorced (and very lost) mother in a house built and paid for by her famous grandmother. She’s expected to do what every other girl does that summer – smoke cigarettes, talk about boys, swim with her girlfriends and be generally aimless. Instead, a chance encounter with an enigmatic older girl makes Evie question her place in the world. Drawn into a cult based on the Manson Family, Evie tries to build her loyalties in a world that simultaneously draws her in and rejects her.

Years later, Evie is single, house-sitting a friend’s house when she is unexpectedly joined by the friend’s son and his girlfriend, a young girl Evie sees simultaneously as a past version of herself and someone that past version would have loved. The story is told in flashbacks by middle-aged Evie and the presence of the young girl really adds to the menace of the story.

And it’s very menacing. You know from the outset that this is not a nice story. It’s bleak in places, and confronting, and ugly and boring and totally, totally engrossing – I could not put it down. The relationship – part worship, part covetousness – between Evie and Suzanne is beautifully rendered and leaves you wanting concrete answers. None are forthcoming and as someone who spent that period of my life constantly negotiating the boundaries between close friendships between women and sexual relationships, the lack of a definitive ‘are they are aren’t they’ add loads to the novel.

And it doesn’t even need it. The prose is lovely, the scenes place you smack bang in the middle, then jolt you straight out to somewhere else. Cline has a method of entrapping you in a story that is deserved of a much more experienced writer – I can’t wait to read more of her work and watch her style develop to the same level as her writing skill.

This book will make you uncomfortable. It will finish too soon and without answers. It will make you google the Manson Family Murders and cringe at the horror that is human nature. It will make Emma Cline a LOT of money. It will make you hope she writes quickly and prolifically.

4.5/5 stars.