This is less a verdict on the merits of the book and more a recognition that it's almost the opposite of everything I look for in fiction. Just as I hThis is less a verdict on the merits of the book and more a recognition that it's almost the opposite of everything I look for in fiction. Just as I have no desire to read a 600-page David Copperfield, a 600-page reincarnation set in Appalachia held little interest for me. But the book has been much discussed so I thought I'd be a good sport and read it. Kingsolver highlights the scourge of the fentanyl crisis through immersive, character-driven storytelling. The politics are just what I thought they'd be: comfortably liberal but not in a radical way. For such a long book, I really don't have much to say about it. I'm glad so many people enjoy it....more
This is a brooding, atmospheric work from Sophie Mackintosh. Mackintosh takes as her starting point the Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning, but this is This is a brooding, atmospheric work from Sophie Mackintosh. Mackintosh takes as her starting point the Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning, but this is by no means conventional historical fiction. The story is centered on Elodie, the baker's wife, a woman of depth and contradiction. The novel opens with the arrival of Violet and her husband, the ambassador, into the village. From there, Mackintosh weaves a darkly evocative tale. The star is Mackintosh's pitch-perfect prose, with a subversive narrative that foregrounds emotional beats over plot. The result is what I'd call muted gothic: we have the trappings of horror, played out in a decidedly understated register. We see the interplay between taboo and hysteria, as Mackintosh plays with the relationship between the two and subtly upends our notions of cause and effect....more
Children of Paradise is Camilla Grudova's foray into the novel form, a follow up to her evocative story collection, The Doll's Alphabet. A surface reaChildren of Paradise is Camilla Grudova's foray into the novel form, a follow up to her evocative story collection, The Doll's Alphabet. A surface reading yields a readable and raunchy tale of mostly young adults who work in an Edinburgh-based movie theater. The theater transitions from private to corporate ownership midway through. There's not much more to the plot, but I don't really read this as a plot-focused book. Instead, it's a work that plays with reader expectations and makes some interesting comments on taste, audience, and perspective. It's a book about film, but it is told from the perspective of workers in a cinema, not filmgoers or critics, a choice that highlights a subtle class commentary running throughout. The story is also told with an eye for filthy details, evoking a sense of disgust as we cross the bounds of good taste and expectations of literary fiction. Bodily fluids, adulterated food, and a general sense of uncleanliness permeate the work. It's also quite intertextual, largely eschewing literary references for film references - another inversion of what we expect from literary fiction. The result is an intriguing mix of palettes and tones, social commentary and literary inversion. It's a book that can divide opinions, our reactions laying bare our sense of taste and our own expectations about what fiction should do....more
Fire Rush is a searing work from Jacqueline Crooks. The story is set among the Jamaican diasporic community in the early Thatcher years, first in LondFire Rush is a searing work from Jacqueline Crooks. The story is set among the Jamaican diasporic community in the early Thatcher years, first in London and environs, with later stops in Bristol and Cockpit Country, Jamaica. The opening chapters are particularly evocative, depicting the underground dub scene in the late 70s, with daytime scenes marked by deadly violence that feels both unpredictable and inevitable. Crooks has spoken about her novel illuminating the politics of invisibility - a particularly apt description for the London chapters where characters are both seen and unseen, and young people dance the night away in an underground crypt. The early scenes might be the most memorable, but I thought the novel really took off in the Bristol chapters, the hazy vibes from the London section crystalizing into a dark and toxic b-side. Although the book probably could have used a tighter edit, I appreciated what Crooks was doing so much that I didn't mind. Dub is a genre that largely exists in music and poetry; it's interesting to see Crooks work the form into her novel. Music and dance play a huge role in this book - influences that Crooks pulls off nicely. Crooks also infuses the work with Jamaican patois, particularly in dialogue, which elevates this from a solid coming of age story to an evocative and memorable work....more
This is a conceptually interesting debut from Cecile Pin, albeit one that didn't work for me in practice. The main character is a second-generation imThis is a conceptually interesting debut from Cecile Pin, albeit one that didn't work for me in practice. The main character is a second-generation immigrant, Jane, whose family made their way to the UK in the early Thatcher years as a part of a group of refugees known as boat people. I found most of the story almost unreadable. The early narrative was a retread of countless immigrant stories, the characters and story beats interchangeable with other accounts we've all read dozens of times. The prose was melodramatic in all the wrong ways. Some of the passages, like those voiced by the dead brother, were just plain silly. But then, in the last third of the novel, we come to see that Pin has framed this in an interesting way. What we eventually see as the outer frame, set in the more recent past, re-contextualizes everything that came before as an attempt to exercise grief and trauma felt by a second generation immigrant. Ultimately, it is a story about the power of writing to heal. I ended the book with an appreciation for Pin's efforts, but there's no denying that almost all of it is dreadful to read....more
Conceptually, Homesick is a fascinating multi-textual project. Jennifer Croft is best known as a translator of Polish and Argentine Spanish, winning tConceptually, Homesick is a fascinating multi-textual project. Jennifer Croft is best known as a translator of Polish and Argentine Spanish, winning the 2018 International Booker among her accolades. So it makes sense that her foray into fiction would bridge languages, not to mention modes. Croft published the first version of this in 2017 as a novel written in Spanish, bearing the title Serpientes y escaleras (Snakes and Ladders). A second version was published in English, now titled Homesick, and sold in the US as a memoir, replete with photographs pulled from Croft's life. A third version was published in the UK by Charco Press in 2022, the extratextual elements removed and billed now as an English-language novel. Add to the mix a website with photos captioned in various languages - Haitian Creole, Polish, Spanish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Turkish, Swedish - and you have a nifty multi-part work that blurs labels and boundaries. Personally, I thought the meta elements were more interesting than the text on the page, but conceptually I found the whole thing fascinating. It reminds me of the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Diego Garcia, also a multi-textual work existing across platforms. Diego Garcia was perhaps a bit more innovative than the novel-memoir-novel that is Homesick, and in truth the innovative elements here might be driven more by circumstance than by design, but any boundary-blurring work like this holds a certain appeal to me no matter its genesis....more
I am, well, a fan of this one. Sheena Patel has written a scorching social critique that touches on male entitlement, social media fixation, asymmetriI am, well, a fan of this one. Sheena Patel has written a scorching social critique that touches on male entitlement, social media fixation, asymmetrical relationships, and the patriarchal (and racist) social structure that holds it all in place. The story takes its cues from the bevy of books featuring a messy millennial protagonist who doesn't quite have their life together, struggling against a system that locks them out of the material standing older generations took for granted. But where Patel departs from other books of this type is with a move away from the narrative of personal struggle to one focused on systems. Patel's narrator is self-aware from the start. She knows exactly what she is up against and isn’t distracted by personal failings even when engaging in what an older paradigm might call self-destructive behavior. The change she calls for isn't about personal growth, but instead a structural upending of a toxic online and irl culture. The most powerful passages lift the lid on the fictional story to speak directly and candidly. This is I suspect a harbinger of a new type of fiction, one that cares less about story beats, character arcs, and buried themes - and is more explicitly political with urgency and clarity. In this way and others, Patel eschews a traditional narrative arc, departing from the received novel form in important ways to make this all the more radical. Published by Rough Trade Books, I read this last summer when it was still under the radar. It's been exciting to watch it catch on with a larger audience....more
Trespasses captures a time and place - Northern Ireland ca. 1975 - just about as well as any historical work out there. That this is Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses captures a time and place - Northern Ireland ca. 1975 - just about as well as any historical work out there. That this is Louise Kennedy’s debut novel is all the more impressive. Set in a small town outside Belfast at the height of the Troubles, we see a mixed community coming to terms with increasing sectarianism. Many of us viewing the Troubles from the outside, at a remove of time and distance, might see both sides as rather unsympathetic. Kennedy shows the situation with nuance, including a class element that adds another layer to the dynamic. At its heart, this is a personal, character driven work. We follow Cushla Lavery, a young RC schoolteacher, who doesn’t always follow the route prescribed for her, trespassing (as the title suggests) into a married relationship and, separately but perhaps relatedly, into the family life of one of her students. What might in another time and place be decisions that have only personal consequences, we see that in 1975 Northern Ireland Cushla’s choices have ramifications that impact her family and community. With our own society seeing alarming levels of polarization, this is at times a sobering read....more
Glory is a satirical send-up of the fall and aftermath of the Robert Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. The country, renamed Jidada for the story, is satirizeGlory is a satirical send-up of the fall and aftermath of the Robert Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. The country, renamed Jidada for the story, is satirized as a janky outpost republic, caught in a post-colonial cycle of misrule. Each of the characters is portrayed as an animal - an old horse, donkey, pig, goat, tweeting baboon (guess who) - which lends a layer of farce to the proceedings. Life in Jidada is brutal, although for me the brutality is somewhat minimized because the victims, like the perpetrators, are talking animals. I can see, though, how the distancing device may make the book more readable for those who are closer to the trauma. References to Killer Kau’s hit Tholukuthi Hey, the unofficial pop anthem of resistance (iykyk), are punctuated throughout. Ordinarily, I might have appreciated a bit more subtlety, but one of the functions of the book is to lay bare the absolute farce of a strongman regime, particularly for leaders who until quite recently were considered untouchable for this type of satire. On that score, this is nicely done....more
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