Category: fiction

FOURTH WING by Rebecca Yarros

Here is a multi-million copy bestseller.  It’s about school for dragon riders, kind of GAME OF THRONES meets HARRY POTTER, with some added TWILIGHT, and you can see where that got the publisher’s immediate greenlight, because let’s give the people what they want.  I read a charming article with the author, Rebecca Yarros and learnt she is a military wife (and mother of six!) who’d written twenty or so contemporary romances that sold only middlingly well, before she hit on this mashup of high fantasy and romance, which has made her famous.  Her mind is blown.  

So I love the author, but I’m afraid this is not really my kind of book. I just can’t get passed how dumb it is.  I think this is more a me-issue than the book’s issue though, and is all down to my being rigid and joyless.   A better person would not be immensely bothered by the fact that the love interest’s name is ‘Xaden’!  I mean: Xaden?!?.   In any case, I did read the whole thing – it’s very more-ish, with lots of plot and twists and turns and will-they won’t-they – which I really admired.  And I’m delighted for this lady’s success.

DREAMSTATE by Eric Puchner

In this novel a woman scraps her wedding after falling in love with the best man.  JUICY!  Interestingly though, this exciting premise only takes up the first maybe 20% of the book.  Then we follow the main characters – the ex-groom, the wife, the best man, through what turn out to be long and interconnected lives.  It’s pretty sad at the end. This is not because they lead sad lives.  It’s full of all the stuff lives are full of, children, jobs, crises, etc.  It’s not even sad because at the end they are old, and deal with the stuff that comes if you are lucky enough to get old, dementia, cancer, etc.  It’s more just a feeling of: so that was that.  All that drama, changing husbands, breaking hearts, and you all end up at the same place in the end.  

I really loved some of the descriptions.  We’ve got a child “seven years old and preposterously beautiful, like a child in a French movie;’ we’ve got chimpanzees “lounging around their enclosure like Romans after an orgy;” or this, on Haloween:  “Occasionally someone executed a costume so perfectly that it made you wonder whether you’d undersold what life had to offer. ” 

Or this, from when the bride first meets the best man, Garrett: 

“He had one of those pitiable mold-length beards, less a fashion choice than a flag of surrender.    . . . Charlie had said Garrett was having a bit of a hard time – what that meant exactly, Cece wasn’t sure, except that in guy-talk ‘a bit of a hard time’ generally meant something much worse.  It meant depression or addiction of both.”  

LOL.  Well done this author.  This must have taken some serious work. 

SAO BERNARDO by Graciliano Ramos

Here in a deeply charming elderly edition is a book that assumes a lot of background knowledge about Brazilian land ownership in the 1930s. Lacking this, it was slightly puzzling. But I can say it was bleak. Apparently a classic in Brazil, it tells about a man who pulls himself up from poverty to ownership of a large rural estate. He marries a woman who he thinks is too good for him, and proceeds to make her life hell. She kills herself. Then he feels sort of bad but not that bad and keeps building his estate. Not sure what the political context was in Brazil at the time, but I can say that this was probably not intended as a ringing endorsement of landowners.

PLAYWORLD by Adam Ross

I had a lot of contradictory feelings about this lengthy book. On the one hand it was full of incident, covering a year in the life of a fourteen year old child actor, who is being groomed by a family friend, while his parents consider divorce. On the other hand it was kind of dull. And yet I read the whole thing. And I guess I’m happy I did, it was so detailed and fully realized, I feel like it was a kind of vacation in 1980s New York adolescence. Mostly it made me glad to be an adult in London in the 2020s.

IN CHANCERY by John Galsworthy


This is the second book in the Forsythe saga, a story of wealthy British family in the early twentieth century. The first one was about a man whose wife falls in love with someone else. As divorce was very hard to achieve, cue a lot of being tormented. In this second book, everyone gets their acts together and does what they should have done in the first place, i.e: ignore the haters and just get a divorce! Meanwhile some other characters die in the Boer War. I am not sure how many more of these books I am going to do. The wife character is really an insufferable ‘perfect fantasy’ and it’s really irritating me for some reason.

YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES by Alvaro Enrigue

This is a fictional account of the first meeting of Cortes and Moctezuma.  I really enjoyed its effort to deeply imagine the Aztec empire.  It is a book very much about daily life, e.g., how did the Spanish trim their toenails?  But what I mostly liked was the freedom of the author, who brought a very contemporary voice to these historic figures. I can’t think when I’ve seen that before.  Try this: “Inside each of us is a skull,” Enrigue writes, “and that’s all that will be left of us when we’re gone; thanks for your participation.”

We did get into slightly dicey territory at the end, when the author inserted himself in the present day into the story (snore) but overall I found it an unusual and interesting take on a famous moment in history.

BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA by Dorothy Allison

This novel is about a girl born to a 14 year old waitress.  The waitress has a big family, who help her with child care, so it is a lot about that family.  It is kind of an uplifting story of small town life, until the waitress marries a man who starts sexually abusing the child.  The child eventually tells an aunt, so the mother removes them from the man; but then he ‘promises’ not to do it again, so they go back.  The mother tries to make sure they are never alone together.  Great solution!  Then he rapes her really brutally,  and the mother walks in on it.  The child goes to hospital, but her mother DECIDES TO MOVE TO CALIFORNIA WITH THE MAN (!?!).  

This just seems so awful as to not really be believable, but I’m sorry to tell you that apparently this is a lightly fictionalized version of the author’s life.  To be fair, her mother never actually left her, but she did make them all live together even once she was aware of the ongoing abuse.  He even gave her an STD, which left her permanently infertile.  Sounds like a gruelling read, and it sort of was, but it also wasn’t, because I guess of the courage of the author, who has rebuilt her life with amazing courage.  I learn from the Introduction that the book has been banned from schools on many occasions. I know that people who make sure bans like to claim they are protecting children, but I think we all know who this actually protects.  

There was an interestng line to a character recently bereaved: Now you look like a Boatwright.  Now you got the look.  You’re as old as you’re ever gonna get, girl.  This is the way you’ll look until you die.  

FELICIA’S JOURNEY by William Trevor

A very compelling story about a young Irish girl who gets pregnant and comes to England to find the father with whom she had a holiday romance. She doesn’t find him, but she does find what we slowly conclude is some kind of SPOILER ALERT serial killer. This makes it sound like it’s cheesy, but it’s really not. Trevor is a really gifted writer and tells the story from both POV in a very compelling way. My main take away is, THANK GOD FOR FEMINISM. This poor girl is so messed up that she really is barely able to advocate for herself in even the most basic ways, and that’s before she meets the serial killer.

PRIVATE CITIZENS by Tony Tulathimutte

This book is very more-ish and seethes with verbal energy. Try this:

“If you preferred the indoors, everyone assumed you were scared of life and emotionally stunted. That wasn’t it. . . . Sure, it was nice to have some fresh air while he smoked. But he was myopic, hard of hearing, congested – reality was lo-fi, slow and obstructing, too cold or too bright, filled with scrapes, sirens, hidden charges, long distances, pollen, and assholes”

It was also kind of hilarous; one character, we are told, has seen ‘most of’ the porn on the internet. Given that this is set in 2007, what is eerie is I guess this might just conceivably be possible. Today I suppose it would take several lifetimes. The book tells the story of four friends living in San Francisco a couple of years after they graduate from Stanford. About two-thirds of the way through, I started to get exhausted. Everyone was so self-harming! There was anorexia, self hatred based on race, failing to take your anti-psychotics, lying about rape, and that’s just the first few I can think of. And of course there was no redemption: it was just self-harm and self-harm some more. But weirdly I still enjoyed it.

TROUBLES by JG Farrell

This author was kind of a jock at university. Then he caught polio, poor guy, just a couple of years before the vaccine was invented, and had to abruptly enter an iron lung to stay alive. Sport’s loss was literature’s gain, because he’s a wonderful writer. This book tells the story of a WWI veteran who goes to visit a woman he met in Brighton during his leave. She says she is fiance; he can’t remember if she is or not. It gets weirder from there. The alleged fiance lives in an enormous decaying hotel in Ireland, and dies almost immediately after he gets there. For some reason he stays on, while the hotel crumbles around him. A bunch of stuff then happens that has something to do with Irish political history, I could not follow all that. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. Here is a taste, when they brought in the family dogs to try and chase out the huge family of cats who were living in abandoned rooms:

“But it had been a complete failure. The dogs had stood about uncomfortably in little groups, making little effort to chase the cats but defecating enormously on the carpets. At night they had howled like lost souls, keeping everyone awake. In the end the dogs had been returned to the yard, tails wagging with relief. It was not their sort of thing at all.”