Claire Stevens's Blog, page 10

Waiting On Wednesday - Lady Mary by Lucy Worsley

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme that gives us all a chance to highlight upcoming releases that we're particularly excited about.  This week, my Waiting On Wednesday pick is Lady Mary by Lucy Worsley.  Here's the blurb:

Mary Tudor’s world is turned upside-down when her father, Henry the Eighth, declares his marriage to her mother is over and that Mary isn’t really his child. How can he do such a thing? Banished from court and separated from her beloved mother, Mary realises her family will never be as she hoped.

Alone for the first time in her life, Mary must fight for what is rightfully hers. Despite what anyone says, she will always be a princess. It is in her blood. But without her fierce mother by her side, will Mary find the strength? Is there anyone Mary can trust? And how will she survive?

Popular historian Lucy Worsley tells the thrilling, dramatic and touching story of Henry the Eighth and Catherine of Aragon’s divorce as you’ve never heard it before.

Things I Should Have Known by Claire LaZebnik

Okay, so this book's blurb starts off as follows:

Things Chloe knew: Her sister, Ivy, was lonely. Ethan was a perfect match. Ethan’s brother, David, was an arrogant jerk.

Well, I wonder where on earth this plot could possibly be going?

No, I'm being snarky, but there was an element of 'Well, obviously Chloe and David are going to end up together'.  Spoiler Alert: they do.

Despite this, there were a couple of twists that kept it interesting and on the whole it was pretty well written.  

The autism representation was authentic (I know from experience) and made me chuckle in recognition in a few places, especially with the bluntness with which Ivy and Ethan speak and their mortification when they get social situations wrong.  

Ivy and Ethan are both moderately high-functioning and were really great characters.  David and Chloe were similarly interesting characters although obviously in a different way and the relationships they had with their siblings was very touching.

This wasn't a very long book, but it was a nice enough read and everything was sewn up nicely in the end.

4 stars

The Sleeper by Emily Barr

This was a long, tangled but pretty gripping story about a woman with a shady past that catches up with her.

So the premise of the book is that our MC, Lara is stuck in a dull-ish marriage with a man she's not suited to.  They've tried to have children and are up to their eyeballs in IVF debt.  To clear the debt and give herself a bit of breathing space from Mr Boring, Lara takes a well-paid contract in London and commutes on the sleeper train from their house in Cornwall every week.  On the sleeper, she meets Guy, who is totally hot and fancies her back.  Unfortunately, Guy is also married and the two start up a saucy affair.

That's when this book starts spinning off into a slightly more bonkers plotline.  We switch points of view to Lara's friend, Iris (who is also struggling with her past) and take off to Asia.  Everything is a bit thriller, which is a genre I don't typically go for, but I'm really glad I did here.  It was gripping and fun and I could totally see what the ending was going to be but I didn't care.

I've read quite a few Emily Barr books, every since Backpack (her first book) was published, and I think she's a really sound author.  She's not like high literature or anything, but she writes a really good yarn with fleshed-out characters.

Also, I listened to the audiobook of this an the narrator was spot on.  She did really good voices without going over the top and really added something to the narrative.  I don't get on with every audiobook as sometimes the narrator can ruin it for me, but in this case the narrator was great.

The only criticism I'd have of this book is the overwhelming lack of diversity.  Seriously, every single person is white, hetero, cis, able-bodied and middle class.  Lazy, lazy writing.  I know thrillers are all about the plot, but actually Emily Barr is really good at characterisation too, so it wouldn't have been difficult to make this book more diverse.  Not every LGBT character has to have their story arc about coming out, not every BAME character has to have their story arc about overcoming racism (although these story lines are important too), there's no reason why thrillers can't be diverse.  Everyone deserves to see themselves in books.

Lack of diversity aside, this was still a good book.  I listen to audiobooks while I'm decorating or doing chores, and this one brightened up my boring work for a good week or so!

4 stars

My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

​This was a really readable book, beautifully written, that challenged my opinions and made me think about what I'd do if i were ever in the situation the characters in this book find themselves in.

So can I just start by saying what an arsehole I thought Sara (the mother) was.  As a mum, I totally get that if your child was diagnosed with a life-threatening condition then you would do literally anything to cure them, and I don't blame her at all for conceiving a 'designer baby' whose cord blood could be used to treat her ill child.  However, I think it's not great parenting to have another baby and to tell them constantly that the only reason they were born was to save their sibling. Like, they have no other use in life.  Pressure, much?  Also, she's a crap parent because literally all her attention goes on Kate and she leaves her other two children to basically fend for themselves.  THEN, when her saviour child speaks up and says, No, actually, I like having both of my kidneys, she throws all her toys out the pram.  I think Jodi Picoult meant for us to identify with Sara's horns-of-a-dilemma situation, but actually there was no dilemma.  She was completely unidentifiable and I didn't like her one single bit.

The story is told through multiple viewpoints, so the story is like a bunch of threads all woven together.  It didn't make the story as confusing as you'd think it would be, and it added something to the story (I still thought Kate and Anna's mum was an arsehole).

I totally felt for Anna and rooted for her.  Ditto for the dad.  I wasn't a fan of Kate - I thought she was pretty whiny (I KNOW!  I know she has leukaemia and has a reason to whine).  I felt so sorry for Jesse.  And Campbell and Julia's will-they-won't-they romance thing was okay but not really relevant to the main story.

I kind of knew what the end was going to be - I think because this was such a famous book and then a high-profile film, the ending had just seeped into my consciousness - but it was good nonetheless.  A definite ending. 

Things A Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls

This book has been on my radar for a little while and because last week saw the 100th anniversary of women being awarded the right to vote (albeit in the most caveat-laden way possible) I thought it would be a good time to finally pick it up.

This book is a well-researched, well-written account of the women's suffrage movement and the impact it had on society.  It explores the difference between suffragists and suffragettes (legal/non-violent vs violent/illegal activity) and the effect the war had on women and children and the movement in general.  

The narrative is told from three points of view - Evelyn, who is middle-class, intelligent and longs to go to university, except she can't because she is a girl; May, who is liberal, gay and fairly well-off, who lives with her suffragist mother; and Nell, who is working class, who works in a  munitions factory during the war, doing the very work that inspired one politician (whose name escapes me at the moment), on the passing of the Representation of the People Act 1918, to say, 'they've earned it [the right to vote]'.  Like you have to earn the right to be treated like a human fucking being.

May and Evelyn's paths cross at the very beginning of the book and then diverge as Evelyn becomes involved in the Suffragette movement and May, a Quaker and a pacifist, pursues the Suffragist path.  May and Nell meet and fall in love, but apart from that the strands of the story don't intertwine, even though I kept expecting them to.  The author does a great job of showing how the suffrage movement and the First World War impacted the three girls, but I don't know.  I kept thinking they'd meet up again.

This was literally the only criticism I'd have of this book, though.

The characters were just great - I really rooted for them even when they were doing things I wouldn't have or were making dumb mistakes.  They all grew and learned and developed as the story progressed.  I was pleased (?) that there was a bittersweet ending - the ending of the book is in 1918 when the Representation of the People Act is passed in the Commons, but the three girls in the book still won't get the chance to vote until the law was amended in 1928 because the 1918 Act only applied to women over thirty.

I thought the portrayal of working-class suffragists was fab.  Traditionally, we only really hear the narrative of middle-class suffragists - the sorts of ladies who were educated to a point and then were expected to sit at home having tea, producing children (who were shipped out to nannies) and running households.  They had time on their hands to go out demonstrating and leafleting and protesting.  What we don't so often hear about is the suffragists working in factories or doing piecemeal work at home with loads of children running around their feet.

Yes.  This book was great.  Go and read it now.

4.5 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - I Have Lost My Way by Gayle Foreman

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme that gives us all a chance to spotlight the upcoming releases we're eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting On Wednesday pick is I Have Lost My Way by Gayle Foreman.  Here's the blurb:

Around the time that Freya loses her voice while recording her debut album, Harun is making plans to run away from everyone he has ever loved, and Nathaniel is arriving in New York City with a backpack, a desperate plan, and nothing left to lose. When a fateful accident draws these three strangers together, their secrets start to unravel as they begin to understand that the way out of their own loss might just lie in help­ing the others out of theirs. 

An emotionally cathartic story of losing love, finding love, and dis­covering the person you are meant to be, I Have Lost My Way is best­selling author Gayle Forman at her finest.

Who Runs The World by Virginia Bergin

This was an okay-ish book set about sixty years from now where, following a global virus that wiped out all the male humans, women now run the world.  And the world is a nicer place.  

I was really intrigued to read this and it had a lot of promise but ultimately there was a bit too much waffle from the MC and not enough exploration of some key gender concepts.

I've read reviews where people have found this quite a man-hatey, rad-fem book.  I can see why, I guess.  The author has set up a world where men have disappeared and subsequently so did all the crime and greed.  

But this is a bit of a post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc (I know!  Latin!  And so early in the morning) argument and I don't think it was what the author meant.  Just because the Utopian society came about after the men were wiped out, doesn't mean it came about *because* the men were wiped out.  I think the author was actually trying to say that it was a global cataclysm that lead to a society where there was no crime or greed.

And yes, a lot of the characters do speak about men in disparaging terms, but the only characters who do this are the ones who have never known men.  And I guess if you've never known men, you might hear about all the awful things that happened pre-apocalypse and think that men were the root of all evil.  When River meets Mason, she refers to him as 'it', which is pretty awful, yes, but don't forget she's grown up in a world that has no male pronouns, no boys or men.  For River, meeting Mason is like aliens descending to Earth.

And Mason?  He's misogynistic, thinks women are weaker than men, that they should dress like bikini babes.  He's grown up in a battery farm where violent video games are the only source of entertainment, where boys and men are kept in militaristic cells and violence is the norm.  We're all a product of our upbringing and Mason is definitely a product of his.

So why only three stars (and I'm being generous with three stars)?  I guess it's because this actually wasn't a great book.  The characters were a bit limp and I never really got a feel for who they were.  The main character, River, was annoying and childish and spoke in random all-caps to get her stroppy point across.  I was quite surprised she was considered mature enough to have a vote on the collective council, to be honest.  None of the characters really grew or changed and I found them a bit meh.

Also, the author never mentions what happens to trans women in the male sanctuaries (in fact, we don't learn a lot about the male sanctuaries at all, other than that they're violent places).  Are there trans women?  I think in a book that sets out to explore the concept of gender, it was a mistake to leave this out.  Trans men are mentioned in a kind of oblique way, and actually it would have been better if this could have been explored a bit more. 

There was a kind-of romance, but I was never really sure if it was romance or just friendship and it seemed really tepid.

The plot went well for the first half of the book and I could see lots of different directions it could have gone in, but the second half of the book just fizzled out and the ending was more of a whimper than a bang.

So yeah, it was okay and it had a lot of potential but it could have been a lot better and would probably have worked better as a dual-narrative book.

3 stars

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

This was an incredibly moving graphic memoir, beautifully illustrated, about a family whose roots are in Vietnam, but who emigrate to America after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

I'm from the UK, so the Vietnam war isn't really part of our collective memory - we know about it from war movies or news articles or books, but I don't know anyone who fought there.  A long time ago I used to work with an Australian woman whose parents fled to Australia from Vietnam, but because I was younger and more self-absorbed and worried about seeming too prying, I never asked her anything about it.

The Best We Can Do has taught me a lot about the history of Vietnam and what the Vietnamese people on both sides of the conflict went through, as well as the aftermath, and in doing so I think it's taught me more about what refugees in general go through.  Books like this make you feel so lucky to be living the life you do.  There's a bit at the end that shows the actual refugee documentation photos that were taken of Thi and her family in a camp in Malaysia and I think that was the bit that affected me most of all.

As well as being a book about the impact of war and refugee status on families, this is also a book about becoming a parent and the changes it wreaks on your life.

I could hear echoes of my mother's voice speaking to me in my own childhood ... but I could feel the voice coming from my own throat.

This is such a mum thing to think and I can remember thinking exactly the same thing when my own children were born.

And the illustrations in this book are exquisite.  Just, so beautiful.  They're done in a kind of pen and ink / watercolour style and I could have sat looking at them all day.

Recommended for everyone, but I think this will especially strike a chord with parents.

5 stars

Tricks by Ellen Hopkins

Five teenagers from different parts of the country. Three girls. Two guys. Four straight. One gay. Some rich. Some poor. Some from great families. Some with no one at all. All living their lives as best they can, but all searching...for freedom, safety, community, family, love. What they don't expect, though, is all that can happen when those powerful little words "I love you" are said for all the wrong reasons.

Not what you'd call a happy-go-lucky book, this one.  Ellen Hopkins explores, in her trademark free-verse style, the many and varied reasons that teenagers end up in prostitution.

The story is set around the US but focuses on Las Vegas and is told through the eyes of a number of teenagers who each tell their stories.  Spoiler alert: none of the stories are happy ones.

I rooted (if you can call it that) for some of the characters more than others.  Seth was an idiot.  I wasn't really a fan of his.  The others I felt sorry for in varying degrees, but they were all very human.  Although there are five viewpoints going on here, it never felt too cluttered and I moved from one story to another and back again quite seamlessly.

The writing is incredibly intense - I felt like I'd been wrung out by the end and the characters haunted me (and not in a good way) afterwards for a while.

All five characters' stories are wrapped up at the end, for good or bad, and there was the sense of an ending.

4 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - More Than We Can Tell by Brigid Kemmerer

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme that gives us a chance to highlight upcoming releases we're eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting On Wednesday pick is More Than We Can Tell by Brigid Kemmerer.  Here's the blurb:

Every day Rev struggles with the memories and demons of the time before he was adopted. He’s always managed just fine, until a letter from his birth father brings hellfire, fear and danger back into his life.

Emma escapes her life in an online game she built herself. Virtual reality is so much easier than real life. But then another player joins the game and suddenly ultra-violent threats start to stream in . . . 

When Rev and Emma meet, they are fighting a darkness they can’t put into words. But somehow they hear each other and together they might be able to find a way out . . .