Claire Stevens's Blog, page 4

Veterinary Partner by Nancy Wheelton

Veterinary Partner is the story of Callie, a young widow trying to make a go of her family farm out on the Canadian prarie and Lauren, the new vet in town who has kind of a tragic past.  

So firstly, I now know a lot more about cattle farming in Canada than I did before.  That sounds dreary, but it was actually really interesting!  The extreme weather, small town setting and the immensely hard work of running a cattle and arable farm are all described really well.

I thought the story itself was pretty good - Callie is faced by difficulties at every turn due to her inexperience in farming, including dastardly neighbours who are trying to force her to sell her land and Lauren is trying to patch things up with her children and not get involved in any new romantic liaisons.  This is a romance novel, so obviously there is an HEA, but there are plenty of obstacles along the way.

The biggest problem for me was that I didn't really get the chemistry between the two MCs.  They start off by not liking each other then they became friends and then lovers, but I just wasn't feeling it.  Their path to romance seems to be littered with passive aggressive comments and hurt feelings. When I read a romance I like it when it's obvious that the two people should be together but they're kept apart by outside influences, not their own sulkiness.  It almost seemed like they got together because they were The Town Lesbians, not because they were MFEO.

Other than that, it was totally readable.  The writing itself flowed well and the author obviously has a talent for description.  The dialogue could be a bit forced in places, but it wasn't disastrous.

This is a debut novel and I'd be interested in seeing what the author comes up with next.

I received a copy of Veterinary Partner from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.  Many thanks to Bold Strokes Books and Netgalley.

3.5 stars

The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler

This was a book I'd been meaning to read for about two decades and had never got round to.  What prompted me to read it now?  Watching Little Fires Everywhere last week.  I loved how horrified Reese Witherspoon's character was about the book coming up in her book club and how she couldn't even say the word 'vagina'.  Just brilliant.

Like a lot of iconic books (and this book IS iconic, whether you enjoyed reading it or not) I think I'd inflated it in my mind so the actual reading of it was probably a bit of a let-down.  That's not to say it wasn't good - it was fine, and when you think about the time it was written (late nineties, when it seemed the entire mainstream media was trying to slap down third-wave feminism) it was very progressive and brave. 

The book was in two halves - the first was the transcript of the original monologues, which were interesting, if a bit po-faced.  The second half though was just a load of testimonials from people who had seen/been in the Vagina Monologues on the college days held in the early 2000s.  This was as utterly tedious as reading the Acknowledgements section of a book and 100 o so pages could have been shaved off with the sentence 'Lots of people liked the Vagina Monologues and it changed some lives'.  The barrage of bum-lickery that was the second half of this book was way OTT.

And obviously there's the problem of reducing the experience of being a woman down to the existence of a vagina. I didn't notice any specifically transphobic language (although this could be because I'm cisgendered - if anyone else has an opinion on this, please speak up), and I don't know what the author's views are, but it does have an exclusive feel.  I think if the VM was written today, more would be done to include transgender women in the narrative.  I'd like to think so, anyway.

Also, I personally think I'm the sum of a lot of parts, not just a vagina.  

I do see why this book has had such an impact and I think that the first half is worth reading for its place in history, but I think readers should go into it understanding that this is now an old book and maybe shouldn't be used as a gender compass.

2.5 stars

Kiss Number 8 by Colleen A F Venable

​Be still my heart.  I really loved this graphic novel.

So the plot starts off by talking about Amanda - Mads - who has had a pretty meh experience with kissing so far and it shows her and her pals talking about boys and blah blah blah.  So I went into the book thinking it was going to be quite a fluffy rom com type affair about a girl who does the society default and kisses boys until she figures out she likes kissing girls.

What I actually got was something a bit darker.  Yes, the book is about Mads and her discovery of who she is, but it's also about family secrets, religion, intolerance, hypocrisy, gender politics and transphobia.  The plot gets heavier as it progresses until it's pretty far removed from the candy floss kiss-fest shown in the first few pages.

The art is really light and I really liked it.  It almost didn't match the book's heavy themes, but I thought that was actually ok, it was a nice juxtaposition to the themes the book deals with.  I tried to imagine the book done in an art style more like (to pick a random example)  Maus and I think the whole feel would have been totally different, and not in a good way.

I've seen criticism for the characters in this book being transphobic and/or homophobic, and yes, a lot of the characters are like that.  It's really hard to remember sometimes, but 2004 was still not a great place if you were LGBT - Section 28 had literally only just been repealed (for fun times, Google which MPs voted against repealing this spiteful piece of trash-legislation.  There are some familiar names in there), the Civil Partnership Act was introduced (because LGBT people couldn't yet be trusted with marriage equality) and the Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004, although gender reassignment wasn't a protected characteristic in law until the Equality Act in 2010.  2004 wasn't great.  It was better than 1987, but it was nothing like 2020 (and god knows, 2020 is by no means perfect).

So would I recommend this book?  Yes, totally.  But I would give the disclaimer that it's not a fluffy, rom com beach book.  It has problematic characters and a difficult plot and is more like a history lesson but ultimately it's a rewarding read.

4.5 stars

The Prom by Saundra Mitchell

I really liked the idea behind this book - that there's a girl living in a narrow-minded hick town who just wants to take her closeted girlfriend to the prom only the whole town thinks that somehow the world will end if this happens - and I bought it on that basis.

I was about half way through before I could put my finger on what was wrong with it.  It read like an episode of Glee, but without the music.  Like, there was some overblown, melodramatic plot going on, but it felt like something extra was missing.

It was only when I finished the book that I realised this was actually a novelisation of a Broadway musical (totaly didn't notice the tagline of the book on Goodreads).  So this actually made a lot of sense.

The story is about small-town small-mindedness, bullying and equality.  The MC's voice feels really authentic and she's very funny.  The writing was good - it flowed easily and held my interest. 
 There are a bunch of interesting characters and some conflict between Emma and her girlfriend Alyssa, who is popular and in the closet.  It was all good and I feel a it mean for only giving it three stars.  If there was a way of inserting jazz hands and showtunes into a novel, this would have been five stars.

I would really like to see the musical version of this book (I think Netflix are releasing it this year, or maybe next year) and I think it will be awesome.  This is one of the rare occasions I think the book will not be as good as the screen version, though.

3 stars

Bloodtide by Melvin Burgess

I think this was a case of 'It's not you, it's me' but still I really didn't enjoy this book.

Bloodtide is based on the Icelandic 'Volsunga Saga', but is set in the future where London has been taken over by ganglords and has been walled off from the rest of the UK, where genetically modified animals, halfmen, roam.  A truce is suggested, where the daughter of one clan is given in marriage to the king of another clan and this will set in motion a series of tragic events.

Firstly, it's important to point out that the girl being sold off in marriage is actually fourteen years old, so this book gave me the Ick Factor from the start.  I know plenty of fourteen year olds are sexually active, but the dude she marries is in his late twenties, so this is actually rape.

I went into this thinking that I was going to be reading a far future version of Romeo and Juliet - not entirely sure why because there's nothing to suggest this in the blurb of the book -but even if I wasn't pretty horrified about the child bride thing I didn't go into this book with the right thoughts.  The plot is basically about betrayal and a really long, long revenge story with magic and gods thrown in too.  It's based on an Icelandic story and it really does read like a god-pantheon-hero type story, like Medea or the Odyssey or something.  This isn't what I wanted to read, though.  It's violent, but the violence didn't shock me like a Stephen King novel.  It was an action book, but it didn't excite me.

The story is told from multiple POVs and this made it super confusing, especially as I didn't like any of the characters or find them interesting.  They were entirely self-serving and two-dimensional.  Then there were a bunch of halfmen, which were these genetically modified animal-human-machine hybrids, which sounds like it should have been awesome, but were just dull-bordering-on-ridiculous.

So, from a positive point of view, the writing is actually really good,  I've read a couple of Melvin Burgess's other books and really liked them. He's a great writer. It's really the content, characters and plot of this book I disliked!

There is apparently a sequel to this book.  I doubt I'll be reading it.

1.5 stars

Toast: The Story of a Young Boy's Hunger by Nigel Slater

This is the autobiographical account of a boy growing up in 60s and 70s suburban Britain, centred around the contents of the family larder.  I really like Nigel Slater's TV programs so this was a really interesting insight into where he came from.  

It sounds like he had a pretty malnourished childhood, both emotionally and nutritionally.  It makes for pretty awful reading in some aspects when you look at what he went through as a kid, but I think you need to look at the context of his life.  Just looking at Slater's age and the age he says his parents were when he was born, they would both have been through WW2 - his dad probably would have fought in the war - and this generation were notoriously emotionally cold.  Also, the 60s and 70s were famously bad culinary-wise - it was a whole period between everything being meat-and-two-veg with cabbage boiled to slime and the discovery that mainland Europe actually had some really lovely recipes and ingredients.  The maraschino cherries!  On everything!

Each chapter is only a couple of pages and this, coupled with the very easy writing style, made this book a quick read.  I now kind of want to find out what happened after Nigel started working at the Savoy.

4 stars

The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite

Huh. This was awesome. I don’t really know what I was expecting, but it was miles better than I anticipated. There was a really beautiful (and saucy) romance, loads of science, great plot and girls smashing the patriarchy.

The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics is the story of a young female astronomer, Lucy Muchelney who has never had the chance to complete work in her own right.  When her father (the named astronomer on what is essentially her work) dies, she visits his patron, the Countess of Moth, to ask if she can take on the translation of a French astronomy text.

I have to say, there was so much about this book I loved.  It's a romance, but it's so much more than that.  It's a love letter to all the silenced women who have made contributions to science and the arts without ever being recognised for it.  It's a treaty on art and science and what binds them.  The plot pretty much follows Lucy's translation of the astronomy text and weaves in the growing romance between her and the countess.

And blimey, what a romance.  There's a slow build of feels, but the actual romance happens fairly early on in the book (totally not complaining) and from then on it's all about how they navigate their relationship in a time when most people didn't even think lesbians existed because how could women be so jolly unnatural??  HOW??  I shipped these two so hard and their romance was by no means obstacle-free (but we did get an HEA in the end :-))

The author does an amazing job of poking at nineteenth century attitudes towards women being involved in anything academic, without making the protagonists' responses seem anachronistic.  Their views - and their internalised misogyny - feel real.

I enjoyed this book so much - 100% recommended.

5 stars

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

Yes.  Yes, I liked this.  I've read Becky Chambers' The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet and really enjoyed it (although I've still not managed to read the two follow-up novels, despite having them on the shelf in my bathroom).

This novella has a bit of a different feel, although it is still a sci-fi, space-faring novel with more of a human element than I've ever read in sci-fi before.  It's the story of the small crew of an extrasolar research vessel in an age where scientists have realised that the best way to allow humans to inhabit other planets is to change the humans rather than the environment they're going to.  Because the crew are travelling vast distances between planets, they go into what is effectively stasis while travelling.  Their mission is to research, study and explore each planet and send their findings home before moving on to the next planet.

Like TLWTASAP, this has a decent plot, but the real focus is on the characters.  Despite the fact that this is a novella, each character is well-rounded and by the end I really felt like I knew them.  The plot is just the crew going from planet to planet - what this book is about is how they each react to their situations.

This book is emotional and ultimately hopeful.  It's a love letter to science and also to humanity; the space exploration program isn't funded by governments or private corporations but by millions of civilians crowd-funding it because there was a danger that space exploration would no longer happen.  I think the author genuinely believes in the collective goodness of humanity.  I am more cynical than the author and I think that the general public would only crowd-fund a space program if they could vote each week on one of the astronauts to be thrown out of the space craft, but that might just be me.

4 stars

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Disclaimer: I bought this book because someone told me it was mucky.  It isn't.  Or at least, not what I would call mucky, and this has disappointed me.

Fingersmith is the story of Sue Trinder, adoptive daughter of a stolen-goods handler and a baby farmer.  Sue is convinced by a con artist to go and work as a lady's maid and convince the lady she's working for to marry the con artist.  Once married, he plans to dump the lady in an asylum and pocket her fortune, giving Sue a slice.  Once Sue meets her mark, however, things start to unravel and she starts to unexpectedly care for her mark.

This book is exactly what I always think a Booker Prize nominee would be: dry, humour-free and concentrating more on the words than on the action.  Nothing wrong with that, if that's your bag, but it's not what interests me.  I knew this was a Booker nominee before I picked it up, but I thought my recent success with Girl, Woman, Other meant that I had matured as a reader.  Turns out I haven't.  

The main problem I had with this book is that it is over-long.  The first third is told from Sue's viewpoint.  Then the second third is told from Maud's viewpoint, but just recaps what Sue has already told us.  Yes, it's told from a different perspective, but there aren't enough differences in the narrative to make 90% of the second third worth reading.  In fact, most of the book is overkill.  Scenes happen without much actual plot going on, just the internal ramblings of two unfortunate girls.  And their ramblings were just so tedious!  Every now and then there would be an interesting passage (and no, I don't mean the sex scene - that was far too clouded with euphemisms and metaphor to even be particularly readable) but most of the book was just so damn boring.  It reminded me of Dickens in the worst possible way (I'm not a fan of Dickens).

The second problem I had with this book is that Sue is, as far as I can tell, completely superfluous to Gentleman's plot.  She is literally there to provide a plot twist.  ***Spoiler*** I did see how Gentleman conned Sue into becoming Maud's maid (with money, and the fact that Maud needed a chaperone while Gentleman wooed her), but I didn't see why Maud, for her part of the con, needed Sue.  There was a reason given, but it just seemed flimsy.  Seriously, you can't honestly tell me her family would have found her if she really didn't want to be found.  Why didn't Maud just agree to marry Gentleman and split her fortune with him?  Because, of course, then there would be no made-for-TV plot twist.

The romance for me never really got going.  Sue starts off by slightly despising Maud, then she thinks her sweet, and suddenly she's in love with her.  The romance felt dry and clinical and as such unconvincing.  There were certainly no internal musings about the impact of a same-sex relationship in a time when people were executed for sodomy within easy living memory.

Summary: boring.  Not recommended.

1.5 stars

The Straw King by Isabelle Dethan

This was a pretty good first part to a graphic novel that, as I understand, is being published in two halves.

Neith and Sennedjem are two of the pharaoh’s ‘lesser’ children. The fate that awaits them is for Sennedjem to be a servant to one of his older brothers and for Neitn to become her father’s concubine. Understandably, neither of them are thrilled at this prospect, so the runaway. They are caught immediately by slave traders and taken to the Babylonian palace as slaves.

Firstly, the art in this book was just lovely. It had a vivid watercolour feel to it and managed to evoke the Babylonian court perfectly, including the heat.

The plot was pretty interesting. I know almost nothing about Egyptian/Babylonian society from this period, so it did teach me a few things. There was a big jump, though, between escaping the pharoah’s palace and getting caught by the slave traders, which felt weird.

Neith was a great character, very strong and determined to save her brother. I kind of thought she’d be better off on her own (her brother was kind of helpless) but I admired her loyalty. I want to read the next book to find out what happens to her (although given the time period it’s set in, I can’t imagine her fate is nice).

This would have been better with the second part to the story bound with the first; as it is, the story stopped, just kind of stopped suddenly and now I have to wait to find out what happens next. 

4 stars