I’m sorry. I feel like I’m letting down all the people I just fangirled over The Marriage Portrait with, all the people who excitedly urged me to readI’m sorry. I feel like I’m letting down all the people I just fangirled over The Marriage Portrait with, all the people who excitedly urged me to read Hamnet as well, but I just did not enjoy this anywhere near as much.
I felt that The Marriage Portrait was more polished in terms of its writing, whereas this one’s prose went a bit too purple for me. Parts seemed overwritten. Maybe it wasn't that different-- because, to be fair, TMP certainly went heavy on description-- but it felt like it, perhaps because this style of writing seemed more suited to the courts of the Italian Renaissance than to the countryside of Stratford-upon-Avon. But either way I really struggled to get into it.
Part of the reason this might not have worked is very specific to me-- I am a big Shakespeare lover. I've read all the plays, seen a good many of them, and have sought out every detail of his life… to the point where it felt oddly like I was reading fanfiction. I mean this not as a slight to the author, but just as a comment on myself. I was completely absorbed in Lucrezia's story in The Marriage Portrait, yet I never quite suspended disbelief with this one. I never became immersed in the story and began to feel it was real.
Another likely reason for this is that Hamnet does not hone in on any one character as The Marriage Portrait did. I slid right inside Lucrezia's life, feeling everything with her, whereas this book flits between characters and I never connected with any of them. I was constantly at an emotional distance.
And I never quite warmed to the idea of Agnes as a witch, seer, wise woman, whatever she was.
Depictions of the Black Death always get to me, though. Ken Follett's World Without End did it best. Like a lot of historical events, I mostly view the horror of it in an abstract way, so it hits incredibly hard whenever an author takes you inside that time. The scale of the death, the swiftness of the disease... how terrifying it must have been. O'Farrell did capture some of that. And the ending was also quite good.
It's okay. I'm still going to read more by O'Farrell because I loved The Marriage Portrait so much. I'm thinking maybe I should stick to the stories and periods that I know very little about....more
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. - 'My Last Duchess' by Robert Browning
In school, we studied Browning's 'My Last Duchess'-- a poem about a Duke presenting a portrait of his late wife who, it soon emerges, he himself had killed. The poem always gave me a chill, especially the way in which the Duke casually gloated over his hand in her death. I never knew the poem was based on the true story of Alfonso II, Duke of Ferarra, and his young bride Lucrezia de' Medici.
Here, Maggie O'Farrell weaves a beautifully-written and compelling version of these historical events. A lot has been fictionalized, both because very little is known about Lucrezia herself and because her death is still an unsolved mystery. Tuberculosis or poison? We will likely never know.
Still, the author brings in a lot of historical truth. Lucrezia de' Medici was indeed married at thirteen and, at fifteen, sent away from her family to an unfamiliar land and a much older husband. Alfonso was desperate to produce an heir and was believed to be sterile. After his young wife failed to become pregnant, her health quickly deteriorated and she was dead at sixteen. Rumours circulated that she had been poisoned.
O'Farrell fills in the blanks of the historical record with drama and tension. Lucrezia is a vivid, fascinating character, a fifth, oft-forgotten child who kept to herself, passionate about art and animals. It is easy to place yourself in her shoes and imagine being a thirteen year old child married away to a stranger, completely at his mercy. This was the reality for so many girls at this time, and it must have been truly terrifying and distressing.
It is a curious thing that knowing the outcome of this historical story did not dampen the tension but, instead, seemed to increase it. I felt like I didn't want to look as the book raced toward what I knew would happen, but I also could not draw my eyes away from it. The ending was an interesting-- though, in some ways, horrible --spin on the story. I'll be reading more from this author....more
2 1/2 stars. I really wanted to love this book. I've read some great things about it, and the author brought my attention to SSHL (Sudden Sensorineura2 1/2 stars. I really wanted to love this book. I've read some great things about it, and the author brought my attention to SSHL (Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss) which I didn't even know was a thing before. I appreciated reading a perspective that, to me, was very new.
But I suspect I am just not smart enough for The Hearing Test. The narrative is one long meandering stream-of-consciousness, which, had I known, would have turned me away from the book immediately. I never like stream-of-consciousness styles and this book was no exception.
The mundane happens, the narrator considers it with a thought and complexity I was never convinced it deserved. Occasionally, we would get lines like this:
Silence is when someone says, Actually don’t come, and you tell them you’re already here, waiting downstairs.
... and I would think Man, I’m not sure I’m that deep.
Style issues aside, I could see some important points and themes shining through. The narrator points out the distinction between having words and having sounds, a theme that Angie Kim explored in Happiness Falls. Someone may be unable to hear or speak, but that does not make them literally "nonverbal" as in "without words". A person can have language and understanding, even if they lack the means to hear or speak sounds.
It is unfortunate that I just don't click with this style of writing....more
“Leaving is a kind of death. You may find yourself with much lesss than you had before.”
I've been struggling to get into a few different books lat
“Leaving is a kind of death. You may find yourself with much lesss than you had before.”
I've been struggling to get into a few different books lately, starting them and then quickly stopping when they didn't grab me. To avoid a book slump, I sought out a little book with short chapters. Infinite Country fit perfectly into that description, and it just so happens that it also packed an extremely powerful punch.
I zipped through this, getting caught up in all the characters' stories. It alternates between the present, where Talia has escaped from a girls' correctional facility, and the past, where Talia's parents emigrate to the United States and struggle to create a better life for themselves and stay under the radar to avoid deportation.
There was a very quiet sadness to this tale. Engel has that lovely understated writing style where she doesn't spend pages telling you how to feel, but instead just shows you what happens without fuss or fanfare. Believe me, it's enough. I felt distraught at parts of this novel. Not just because families are torn apart, but at the way they get back up, keep working, keep fighting the system, to hopefully, one day, get back to one another.
Engel explains the pain at the heart of emigrating. To feel ties to a country that is your home, that your family have walked upon for generations, but to break those ties and seek out a better life for yourself and your children, only to wonder when you've done so-- are you really better off? Life is often full of "what ifs" but "what if I'd never left?" is an especially haunting one.
It is imperative to find a woman to blame for a man's crimes.
Wow. This book is tiny in size, just 176 pages, and unobtrusive in cover and title, b
It is imperative to find a woman to blame for a man's crimes.
Wow. This book is tiny in size, just 176 pages, and unobtrusive in cover and title, but it is a deeply emotive and political book, containing commentary on many different subjects— women and men, religion, abuse, politicians, insular communities, and complicity.
It is rare to find a book that so concisely delivers so much, though it is not really surprising. John Boyne's The Heart's Invisible Furies and A Ladder to the Sky are among my all time favourite novels and here he returns to a similar style.
Vanessa Carvin is a well-drawn, complex character who intrigued me from the get-go. Boyne is very skilled at creating memorable characters and imbuing their stories with equal parts sadness and humour. As always, his dialogue is fantastic.
The themes are dark, but the book is never dreary. Boyne very effectively explores what it feels like to be a woman dealing with shitty men who refuse to stop being overgrown children (so much so that I would have sworn a woman wrote this if I didn't know better), as well as looking at a family torn apart by tragedy and scandal, yet a sense of humour shines through the narrative.
In Terenure, I was a member of a book club, but that was mostly because I could find no way out of it.
**
"And you'll be from Dublin, I suppose," she continues, employing a tense that I'm not sure exists in the language.
Keyboard warriors, virtue-signalling politicians, and powerful men who take advantage of others all come under fire over the course of this short book and neither Vanessa nor Boyne holds back their feelings. It says so much in so few pages, which, I think, makes it all the more powerful....more
Moody compelling character study from Sweden. Works for me!
I'm not sure how to adequately review The Details. I stumbled upon it on netgalley and was Moody compelling character study from Sweden. Works for me!
I'm not sure how to adequately review The Details. I stumbled upon it on netgalley and was intrigued by the synopsis of this tiny book. Figured if I didn't like it, well, at least it was short. But I ended up liking it a lot.
In this story, a woman gets malaria, and the subsequent fever takes her mind back to four people who have played major roles over the course of her life-- literally with Johanna, for whom she claims "She was my main character."
The narrator draws each character vividly, making me feel drawn into their intimate world. Johanna, Niki, Alejandro, and her mother, Birgitte, felt real, fleshed out and alive. Through each, the narrator captures something of herself, revealing her own life through her connection to others, as well as exploring themes of love, friendship and mental illness.
The synopsis asks Who is the real subject of a portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush? And it is the key question here. Because while this book paints a portrait of four different people, the real story being told is that of the narrator. It illuminates the fact that any one person's story is merely an amalgamation of the people who've shaped their lives....more
When you're young, every part of life seems big and monumental. Once older, you can see it for what it is: smaller pieces of a larger game you have
When you're young, every part of life seems big and monumental. Once older, you can see it for what it is: smaller pieces of a larger game you have no choice but to play.
The description doesn't do this novel justice, if you ask me. It presents the story as a contemporary, set in Silicon Valley, that deals with depression and a toxic workplace... and while this isn't untrue, it doesn't capture what Ripe actually does.
It is books like this that get under my skin. I can read about gore, abuse, war, horrific tragedy and, while I am moved, I don't feel depressed. This book is depressing. And I feel it should come with a warning to those struggling with depression precisely because it is so good at capturing the darkness of that feeling, that head place where everything in the world takes on an ugliness.
Ripe uses elements of magical realism-- namely, a black hole that follows Cassie around, waxing and waning with her mood --and the writing itself is sometimes dreamy and poetic. At times, it feels slightly satirical. It is certainly not what I would describe as a regular contemporary novel. But I did find the short, hard-hitting chapters really compelling and effective.
You wake up one day and realise what you've become, what you allow, and you have to stare down into the pit at yourself, at your own choices, at the ways in which you have been cunning and stupid and false and wretched to keep up with the world around you. How does anyone bear themselves?
Cassie attempts to survive in a job that constantly demands more from her than she can physically give. She attempts to have a relationship with a man who, no matter how appealing, will never be truly available to her. She attempts to keep going, get up, go to work, keep smiling, as the homeless sleep on the streets around her, as the company she works for exploits another eager young worker. She feels herself playing the game, shitting on others to keep her job, and hates herself for it. To cope, she imagines she is two people-- the real her, and her fake self.
The ending felt a little unfinished to me, but I have no clue how you should end a story like this.
I understood that this book was supposed to contain a deeper message about life, death, tolerance and nature becaPlotless whimsy with flat characters.
I understood that this book was supposed to contain a deeper message about life, death, tolerance and nature because the article that persuaded me to read it told me so. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure I'd have been clueless as to why I was reading about a rude six-year-old and her grandmother having weird wooden conversations about literally nothing at all. Or God and Jesus.
What I find most interesting about The Summer Book is not the book itself, but the story behind it. Tove Jansson was a lesbian at a time when it was considered a mental illness in Finland, and this does shine a unique light on some of the discussions had in the book. Still, I don't think the novel stands alone without knowing this....more
This book reminds me of that early Black Mirror episode "The Entire History of You". The premise is an extension of that concept-- being able to accesThis book reminds me of that early Black Mirror episode "The Entire History of You". The premise is an extension of that concept-- being able to access all of your memories, externalize them, and share those memories with others. In this case, however, we see people also uploading them to share online.
Why would anyone do this? I found it amusing in the Lana and Melora chapters when they thought "no one would be dumb enough to do this" in response to "letting the Internet go inside their computers and play their music". I actually find the premise of this book extremely believable. Even as little as twenty years ago, I think people would have been shocked to hear how 2022 sees people, on a mass scale, sharing intimate details of their lives all over the Internet with complete strangers. Imagine telling someone in the 1980s how we all post pictures and comments and wait around for strangers around the world to validate us with "likes".
No, I think we do have a compulsion to be, if not liked, then at least understood. I think far too many of us feel we'd feel better if only we could adequately explain ourselves. And too many of us, for all kinds of reasons, are attention-seekers at some point in our life. I could see future humans uploading their memories to the Internet and I could also see it being a crisis for mental health.
But this seems all negative so far, and the technology Egan imagines here is anything but. Sure, there are plenty of people with moral objections to Mandala, but the good it has done?
...tens of thousands of crimes solved; child pornography all but eradicated; Alzheimer's and dementia sharply reduced by reinfusions of saved healthy consciousness; dying languages preserved and revived; a legion of missing persons found; and a global rise in empathy that accompanied a sharp decline in purist orthodoxies...
It is this speculative/sci-fi aspect of The Candy House that fascinated me and kept me reading until the end.
The reason I am giving it three stars is because this book is maybe 20% speculative fiction about humanity being able to access their memories (and all the ways this tech shapes the world) and 80% character studies of LOTS of different people, many of whom I never became invested in.
The Candy House reads like many interconnected short stories, not unlike A Visit from the Goon Squad from what I remember, but I found them very mixed. Some of the characters I gelled with easily, like Lana and Melora, and Gregory, others I swear my eyes glazed over reading about them. Like Chris Salazar who runs a nonprofit called Mondrian, dedicated to reclaiming people's privacy.
And these are very detailed, slow-build character studies. Which is fine when the characters and their stories are of interest, but it is very difficult to sit through the daily minutiae of someone you don't care about. I found it odd how the author would sometimes detail every "itch on his balls" yet speak about huge life-changing concepts in the abstract, telling rather than showing that, for example, "Heroin is her great love, her life's work, and she has given up everything for it".
Even as I say chunks of the book bored me, I can recognise it as an amazing achievement. It is a very complex, thoughtful novel that left me with a ton of things to think about. It feels both futuristic and highly relevant to our times, as many of the downsides of the fictional technology of Mandala are issues at the centre of current debates about privacy, access to information, access to misinformation, public shaming, and authenticity in the age of performance culture.
I didn't love reading it as much as I'd hoped, but I think I will love thinking about it for a while....more
There are a number of reasons Our Missing Hearts didn't work for me, but I can sum up my general feeling for the book as being similar to how I felt aThere are a number of reasons Our Missing Hearts didn't work for me, but I can sum up my general feeling for the book as being similar to how I felt about The Testaments and Klara and the Sun (ironic, perhaps, given that I praised Ng in my review of that book):
Our Missing Hearts is a YA dystopia that I guess passes for literary fiction because of the super clever absence of speech marks.
Let me say that I had started to consider myself a fan of Celeste Ng and will likely seek out her future books. Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You were relatively slow, quiet character studies, yet they were excellent examples of slow, quiet character studies. The characters felt alive, felt real. Their suburban worries and struggles, hopes and dreams, pulled me in. It is quite wonderful to be so mesmerized by simplicity.
Our Missing Hearts, unfortunately, had all of the slow pacing and none of the depth of characterization. Bird experiences the loss of a parent and the crumbling of justice and society all around him, but he views it detached, as if from a distance, never quite seeming to experience or react to it himself and making it difficult for me to do so as the reader.
Bird's mother, Margaret, also feels one-dimensional. She makes some difficult decisions-- such as abandoning her son --yet I never once felt let inside the emotional turmoil that surely should have caused.
Instead, much of this novel is given over to describing the details and injustices of PACT (Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act). According to the government, the act sets out to protect American values from foreign influence (China is considered especially problematic), but what it really serves as is an excuse for racism and violence against minorities. People are being arrested for even questioning the act; children are being taken away from parents who are deemed bad influences.
I was having a hard time for the first half of the book when we were on Bird's perspective, but I grew even more weary during Margaret's perspective when we were taken on a flashback through how she met Bird's dad and how PACT came to be.
Perhaps I am just burned out on dystopias at this point. A dystopia has to have something unique or have really memorable characters to hold my interest and stand out in this over-saturated genre. Our Missing Hearts, with its controlling government, banning books, secret resistance and flat characters, was not that....more
I attempted this several times before my netgalley arc expired, but it sadly wasn't to be. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong because I loved ShuggiI attempted this several times before my netgalley arc expired, but it sadly wasn't to be. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong because I loved Shuggie Bain and, in many ways, this is a very similar kind of story with a similar tone.
In fact... could that be it?
Maybe Shuggie Bain ate up my quota of misery and gloom for the next ten years or so. All I know is that I really struggled to get into this. Maybe I'll try again when I'm in a different mood....more
“We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the t
“We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.”
I can see now why The Prince of Tides is so popular. A combination of emotive storytelling, horrific tragedy and witty dialogue makes it almost impossible to put down. Even when the prose veers close to being too purple, too poetic, a sharp funny comment from Tom Wingo pulls it back.
The humour is actually what saves this book from being too much of a lot of things-- maudlin, depressing, gruesome, to name a few. Many awful things happen in these pages as Tom Wingo recounts the events of his childhood in South Carolina. The book begins with his sister's suicide attempt, and the rest of the novel consists of him narrating his upbringing to his sister's therapist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom's way of making flippant remarks in the face of his own pain or discomfort keeps the story relatively upbeat even at the worst times.
The book contains a lot of racism, sexism, n-words and pretty much every 'ism' or 'phobia' you can think of. There is child and spousal abuse and one of the most graphic rape scenes I have ever come across. The whole Callanwolde episode was easily one of the most chilling and disturbing things I have ever read.
The Prince of Tides is far more than just trauma and humour, however, and it isn't so easy to explain all the things this book does. It covers multiple generations of a family and their ties, for better or worse, to the beloved island where they were raised. It's about complex familial love and loving someone who hurts you. It also offers one perspective on the history of the twentieth century and the ways in which the Second World War, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War and nuclear programs shaped people's lives.
My mother never quite finished the task of creating herself; she was always a work in progress. She rarely told a story about her childhood that was not a lie and she practiced the study of her own history with the reckless, renegade eye of the fabulist. Never daunted by something as inconvenient as truth, she made her lies an essential part of her children's identities.
Mostly, though, the characters really shine. Not always in good ways, but all members of the Wingo family are certainly memorable. Tolitha was hilarious and provided one of the book's great comic moments. Amos was a gentle and kind contrast to the violent monster that was his son, Henry. Lila was an utterly fascinating woman who I couldn't hate even when she deserved it a bit. And I doubt I'll ever forget the Wingo siblings.
It does get super wordy and overlong at times. I feel like we could have lost Bernard and the coaching chapters from the story and been just fine without him. I did learn a new word-- "bivouacked" --which doesn't happen too often at this stage in my reading career. So that's nice, I think.
I recommend this to those who enjoy tragic family dramas with strong characters. I do not recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to read about violence and sexual assault. Extra warning-- while Tom himself condemns sexism, racism, and the n-word, the book is rife with it. I suppose this was true to the time and place, but I wanted potential readers to be aware of it before making a decision....more
I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.
I w
I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.
I was not nearly as enamoured by this super-hyped book as I thought I might be, and I think I can pin it down to three main reasons.
1) A novel-length Neruda poem is not really my thing. Don't get me wrong, I've gotten tingles like everyone else when I see a quote like:
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I have no idea what that means but I like it.
The narrator mentions and quotes Neruda in the book, and I got the impression he inspired quite a bit of the style. There are a lot of sentences that straddle the line between poetic and cringy, and maybe it's my mood, but I found them falling more often into the latter category. It's a very introspective novel that gets way too dreamy and star-gazey (add it to the dictionary for me) for my liking.
2) I read Migrations last year and liked it a LOT more. This is a personal thing that obviously won't apply to a lot of people. I picked this book up because the mysterious synopsis and the reviews made me think this could be on the same level as the other near-future ecological novel I read last year.
In fact, there are a number of similarities. Both are set in a future that may very well be just around the corner, both deal with grief and loss, and both are rooted in nature and wildlife. But where I found Migrations taut, compelling and moving, I found this one overwritten and a bit boring, honestly. I thought the obvious stand-ins for Trump (unnamed American president who denies election results and fuels bigotry) and Greta Thunberg (Inga Alder-- teen girl on the autism spectrum who stands up to world leaders about climate issues) were a bit silly, and the parroting of rudimentary philosophy from Robin was uninteresting.
Also, Migrations never felt preachy; this one did.
3) I really disliked the uncriticised anti-medicine, anti-diagnosis and, frankly, anti-science approach this book seems to take. The narrator-- and, seemingly, the book itself --seems to push Big Pharma conspiracy theories. Theo repeatedly ignores the medical advice of doctors regarding his son, is horrified at the notion of "psychoactive drugs" which he sneers at in the same sanctimonious way that some parents gasp Give my child vaccines with mercury in them?(view spoiler)[It's a tiny amount of ethyl mercury that our bodies are well-equipped to break down. (hide spoiler)], and makes the following statement:
"No doctor can diagnose my son better than I can."
Oh, boy. I don't have a sigh big enough.
Now, look. I know that a character saying or doing something is not necessarily the author condoning it, and I would love to be wrong about this, but I really felt the whole book was selling these ideas. And it's... well, a bit concerning.
And on the subject of diagnosis and drugs, I personally think the former is extremely important and the latter sometimes necessary. It's not an easy decision to start psychoactive drugs, especially when the recipient is a young child, but I know from experience that they can be the difference between getting up and sleeping your life away, the difference between being able to look after yourself and sitting in your own filth, and, sometimes, the difference between keeping going and giving up on life. It's not always the right answer, for sure, but sometimes it is, and the way the narrator sneers at drugs and doctors irritated me. And as someone who went a long time without a diagnosis, I know that getting one can be a wonderful key to understanding yourself and others.
If anyone thinks I interpreted this wrong, then I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. I feel quite blindsided that a book about science, space and nature would contain this narrative, so I'd be very happy to be wrong....more
Not my cup of tea, personally. I'm a long-time John Boyne fan, and I thought I could follow him into a satire, having enjoyed his sense of humour in pNot my cup of tea, personally. I'm a long-time John Boyne fan, and I thought I could follow him into a satire, having enjoyed his sense of humour in previous books, but this one was just way too farcical for me.
When I read A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, I liked most of the book but had a couple of complaints. Namely that some of the characters had a very pointed discussion about cancel culture and wokeness that felt gratuitous and out of place, and that the characters in the later chapters ventured into farcical caricatures. The Echo Chamber is like John Boyne took those two elements and turned them into their own book.
The Cleverley family are utterly obnoxious. Each has their own vices, in some way linked to a critique of modern culture. Sometimes I agree with Boyne, other times not so much. I, like him, abhor performative wokeness. The kind where instagrammers and Tiktokers posture, express their morality with social justice hashtags in exchange for likes and follows. I also dislike when people sit behind a screen nitpicking at others' language without lifting a finger themselves.
But most of the jokes didn't quite hit the spot for me, which is not great for a humour book. This was amusing:
'I think I might make a brilliant poet,' she said. 'I live like a poet, don't you think?' 'Only in the sense that you contribute nothing to society,' replied George.
And the one about penguins. I also snorted a little at the Twitter users who tweeted horrendously ugly comments hashtagged with #BeKind. Too close to the truth.
Overall, though, it was all a bit over the top and too on the nose. It's obvious that these criticisms stem from Boyne's own experiences with his book about a trans girl. Maybe if you don't know that, it'll go down better.
P.S. I hate when people say they are "fiscally conservative but socially liberal" as if economic policy doesn't have any direct social consequences....more
Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
I hated and I loved this book. Even as I felt myself burning with fury at
Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
I hated and I loved this book. Even as I felt myself burning with fury at the injustice, even as I felt so empty and sad for Bone, I couldn't look away. I love stories about scrappy "ugly" girls who aren't afraid to bite back at life when it bites them in the ass.
This book really is vicious and horrible, and contains graphic scenes of abuse, rape, and racial slurs. But at the same time it is a good ol' bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale about Ruth Anne Boatwright "Bone", who shines from the page with passion and anger that made me feel like I was burning too, being consumed by this awful book.
It's a very compelling story about poverty, family, and a young girl's journey from childhood to adolescence. Bone is one tough cookie, often a silent observer of those around her, watching family dynamics play out and noting the imbalanced relationships between the haggard women of her family and the men they love.
Men could do anything, and everything they did, no matter how violent or mistaken, was viewed with humor and understanding.
Each of her aunts and uncles adds something special to this story, each a unique and important character. I myself grew up with an assortment of quirky aunts and uncles who played major roles in my early life and hold a special place in my heart, so perhaps that is why this resonated with me so keenly.
Many parts of the book hit hard, not least the ending. I loved Bone for being so spirited and fierce, yet felt sad that someone so young was forced into a position where she had to be....more
We all be speaking different because we all are having different growing-up life, but we can all be understanding each other if we just take the ti
We all be speaking different because we all are having different growing-up life, but we can all be understanding each other if we just take the time to listen well.
What a great story.
The Girl with the Louding Voice really lived up to the hype, in my opinion. One of those novels that combines gritty storytelling with a unique (louding) narrative voice. Adunni's dialect of broken English adds a certain authenticity to the tale, while still being easy to understand and follow, unlike, say, the Nigerian Pidgin in An Orchestra of Minorities (another excellent, but far more challenging book).
The story follows fourteen-year-old Adunni from her rural Nigerian village where she is forced into a marriage with a much older man, to a job under an abusive employer in Lagos. All the while, Adunni is constantly looking for a way to better herself, to become educated, to find her voice and be able to put it to good use. As the reader, we're in a unique position to both see into Adunni's mind-- her wishes, fears and desires --and bear witness to her struggles to understand those around her, especially when someone uses an English idiom that we understand, but she takes literally.
I want to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than the men?
She is met with many hardships, including physical and sexual abuse, making the book hard to read at times, yet, for me, still impossible to look away from out of a need to see that Adunni made it through alright. The novel is also scattered with facts about Nigeria-- each one tying in some way with the story being told --which were interesting to me.
The only minor complaint I have is that I wasn't 100% sold on the necessity of the Rebecca story. It felt like a strange attempt to introduce a mystery subplot, with secret notes and smears of blood and whatnot, and the author really played up the mystery of it all to (view spoiler)[have it resolve in quite a benign way. (hide spoiler)]
But this is still a compelling book with a very charismatic protagonist. Probably one of those that could be read in 1-2 sittings if you have the time to spare....more
If, when scanning the description for this book, your eye was caught by The Devil Wears Prada comparison, I strongly suggest you move your eyes over aIf, when scanning the description for this book, your eye was caught by The Devil Wears Prada comparison, I strongly suggest you move your eyes over a couple of words and take a good long look at the Get Out comparison. I can understand the temptation to compare The Other Black Girl to The Devil Wears Prada, as both are set in a cutthroat work environment and are primarily about women, but I think it could draw the wrong readers to this book. It is not a light feel-good comedy-drama in any sense.
It is a genre-defying mindfuck.
I mean this in a good way. The comparisons to Get Out feel truer to me, and there's no doubt this book takes a sinister turn, especially in the final 20% or so. I experienced a particularly brilliant HOLY SHIT moment when the book revealed itself to me.
It's not the easiest book to recommend or, I imagine, to market. It sits just outside the confines of several different genres, containing elements of contemporary drama, mystery/thriller, and horror. I ended up deciding I liked the book and really enjoyed the clever twists and turns the author took, but I think you could easily be forgiven for discovering this book is not for you. It requires you to enjoy both slower-paced office dramas and horror.
If a slower burn narrative is not your thing, I would skip this one. It spends a lot of time building on the office politics and microaggressions at the fictional publishing company, Wagner Books. There is a feeling of wrongness creeping into this setting early in the novel, but we spend a long time completely in the dark about what is going on.
I enjoyed it, though. It's not often that books take me so completely by surprise and do something as unique and creative as this one does. It requires some patience, but I think the payoff is worth it....more
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