Tag: fiction

WE HEXED THE MOON by Mollyhall Seeley

Here is a book the author describes as being about: “four best friends who fuck around with The Moon and then very quickly Find Out about The Moon.” As you can maybe tell, it is a triumph of voice, and specifically GenZ voice.

The friends do a spell that pulls the moon from the sky.. The moon then comes to their house and wants answers. This plot, while wild, is really neither here not there. What matters is the vibe. Let me not talk about it, let me just quote extensively from the first page:

“Twitter is crumbling, fittingly, into a timeline of what is no longer called Tweets, now called Xs. Twitter is dead & so is nature, probably. Jen’s never having kids. That’s what Jen’s college application was about, framed through a lens of climate grief, ‘the sense of loss that arises from experiencing or learning about environmental destruction or climate change.’ Jen’s college counselor thought grief was a very powerful world. She said Why say grief and not sadness & Jen said Sadness is local, grief is cosmic. Global heating. Universal heating, maybe, who knows. So Jen’s not having kids but she is going to Yale.”

I’ve never read a book quite like it. I can’t say I know what it was ‘about’ – my female friendship? I didn’t care about the characters or anything like that, but I don’t think that was the point.

VIOLET CLAY by Gail Goodwin

I don’t know why this wonderful book is not more famous. I loved it. It tells about a woman trying to be an artist, and covers the terrible fear and dread of that activity better than anything I’ve ever read. Apparently there is a name for the coming-of-age novel of an artist, and it is kunstelrroman, and this is considered by some to be the first female one. (How do we feel about that this only happens in 1978?)

The book is written from the perspective of her early 30s, and covers her confidence as she graduates college (she won a college prize!), to the hard road of the next ten years, during which she has to do commercial illustration, and does less and less of her actual art. She has a LOT of casual sex (is this what the 70s was like? Does not seem hygenic), and suffers very much over how she is intentionally wasting her time and distracting herself from the fact that she is failing – not just in the world’s eyes, but in her own. She is interested in the dates of birth of famous artists, so she can calculate their age at the time of their first big success, and give herself hope that it is not too late for her.

Try this: “New York from across the river resumed the manageable proportions of a maquette, a harmless little table model on which I could project my dreams. It had looked like this when I rode the Carey bus into its center nin years ago from Newark. I still felt the old twinge when I looked at it now. I still wanted to leave my mark on it, even though it had left so many marks on me.”

Substitute London for New York, and I hear you Gail Goodwin, god I hear you. I see this author is still alive and was last published in 2020, so I am for sure going to read more.

THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA by Yukio Mishima

Here is a book for boys, and especially the sort of boys who are interested in Japan. It starts off strong, with a 13 year old boy figuring out how to watch his mother undressing in her bedroom. She gets a sailor for boyfriend, so soon he is seeing more than this, and in particular the sailor’s ‘temple tower.’ (?!?)

The boy is in a creepy gang, and they SPOILER ALERT murder a kitten. I cannot tell you too much about this part because I skipped it. The boyfriend becomes a step-dad, and when he catches the boy peeping, does not beat him but has a healthy conversation with him about it. The boy is horrified, thinking this is unmanly, and so his creepy gang plans to SPOLIER ALERT murder the sailor.

Why?! What was the point of this?!? I am not sure. However, I enjoyed this description of a ship’s horn: “a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale’s back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. “

MOKEY GRIP by Helen Garner

Here is an book about the author’s experience being a young mother in 1970s Australia. She lived a kind of sincerely hippy lifestyle that I am not sure exists anymore. It’s all communal living, unsupervised children and relaxed attitudes to hard drugs. Also no one seems to have a job. It made me wonder wtf I am doing, really.

What I found particularly unusual and interesting in this book was the immediacy of the writing. She does not worry with backstory or context, you are just plunged right into the day to day. And its a very detailed day-to-day, she goes to the toilet a lot, something that almost never happens in books.

Like try this bit from near the beginning:

“Oh, I was happy then. At night our back yard smelt like the country.

It was early summer.

And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change. It wasn’t as if I didn’t already have somebody to love. There was Martin, teetering as many were that summer on the dizzy edge of smack . . . “

GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Emily Henry

I don’t really read genre fiction, except for Emily Henry. She writes clever, fun rom-coms. I was excited for this new one to come out. But it wasn’t really for me. It is about two authors striving to be given the chance to write a celebrity’s memoir, and the main story is intercut with a summary of memoir’s plot. This means half the book is a summary of another, less good book? So I was underwhelmed, though the other half of the book was fun, standard, Emily Henry.

ADELAIDE by Genevieve Wheeler

In this book we see what happens when you date someone who’s not that into you.

Adelaide is madly in love with her boyfriend Rory. He thinks she is okay. She puts in an incredible amount of time and effort for him, and he enjoys it. To be fair, he does not lie to her. When she tells him she loves him, he explicitly tells her he doesn’t love her back. And yet somehow she just cannot let him go. I get it. It’s sad. She’s drinking too much, working too hard, and not eating enough, and SPOILER ALERT it all goes pretty badly wrong.

One thing I really enjoyed was that this book was set very precisely in recent years in London. The main character and I have been to the same plays, same exhibits, same restaurants. That was kind of eerie and I enjoyed it.

KINGFISHER by Rozie Kelly

I typically avoid books described on the back cover as ‘lyrical,’ and this one sailed dangerously close to that dreaded adjective. I can’t say it was a bad book; it’s just not my kind of book.

It tells the story of a gay man who finds himself falling in love a woman. This part was interesting, actually, about how unexpected desire is and what it means for your life and identity. But then it just got kind of sad, and well, lyrical. A great book for someone, just not for me.

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.