Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 35

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh

I read this book. It’s very highly acclaimed and I have a lot of thoughts about it. I can’t say I liked it, as such, but I’m glad I read it.

But am I going to type out all my thoughts about this book? No, because my daughter and I had a podcast conversation about this book (and about Normal People by Sally Rooney). If you want to know what I thought, listen to the podcast!

Mother May I, by Joshilyn Jackson

Bree Cabbatt grew up in poverty, but now she’s happily married to a wealthy lawyer, has two beautiful teenage daughters and a bonus later-in-life baby, and is thoroughly enjoying her life. Then every parent’s worst nightmare happens to Bree — her baby, snoozing soundly in his carseat, is snatched while her back is turned. And while there is a ransom note, the kidnapper’s demand is not for a share of her husband’s millions, which Bree would be happy to give. Instead, to get her baby back she’s asked to commit a dangerous act — which quickly turns far darker and more dangerous than she’d ever imagined.

Joshilyn Jackson, one of my favourite authors ever since her first novel Gods in Alabama, has turned in her last couple of books more in the direction of thrillers than general fiction, and while I don’t usually read thrillers, it’s a turn I’m willing to take in the hands of an author I trust so much. Mother May I kept me turning pages and on the edge of my seat, but the dark sides of human nature that are revealed as Bree attempts to get her child back are never just exploited for thrills and plot twists – they are explored with a sensitivity and depth you’d expect from a writer of Jackson’s calibre. I found this book hard to put down and read it in a day.

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

This book covers similar territory, albeit in a less thorough way, to Stamped from the Beginning, in that it is a history of racism in the US. Rather than attempting an exhaustive history as Kendi does in Stamped, Oluo takes examples from different areas of American life and history — the “Wild West,” professional football, online “Bernie Bros” — to support her thesis: that the entire structure of American life is set up to make life as easy as possible for white men, and that those who fail to do well even at this easy setting are, as a result, often filled with rage towards women and minorities who they feel are depriving them of their natural position at the top.

I foun this book both interesting and informative, and I do agree with Oluo’s basic premise. Not that all white men are mediocre (that’s not her point), but that structural inequalities are in place to ensure that even mediocre white men will land at the top of society’s heap, and that when they don’t, there’s often hell to pay for everyone who isn’t a white man.

Hana Khan Carries On

Like Uzma Jalaluddin’s first novel, Ayesha at Last, this new novel takes us into the heart of a vibrant Indian-Muslim immigrant community in contemporary Toronto, through the eyes of a young woman who loves her community and her faith traditions, but also is a fully modern Canadian woman. Hana Khan is balancing her own budding broadcasting career, her anonymous podcast, and concern for the floundering family business, her mother’s halal restaurant, which is threatened by a new restaurant moving in across the way. As this novel, while not a genre romance, follows a lot of romance tropes, it follow naturally that the young man opening the competing restaurant is handsome and arrogant, and Hana is both repelled by and attracted to him.

Despite the tropes, there are twists and turns along the way to the resolution that I couldn’t have predicted, and while some are light and fun, others, like a hate-fuelled attack on Hana and two other people while they’re on their way to a Blue Jays game, take a much deeper dive into issues facing immigrant communities like Hana’s.

While I had a couple of plot-related quibbles (I thought Hana got off far too lightly for some bad behavior involved in her attempt to sink the restaurant’s rival, and I found a detail about her podcast’s biggest fan a little hard to believe) overall I loved this novel and found it the perfect blend of lightness and depth.

Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell

It’s always nice to pick up a piece of classic literature I haven’t read before and find that it’s absolutely engaging and hard to put down. Wives and Daughters is set in a small English town in the early 19th century. Seventeen-year-old Molly Gibson loves her life with her brusque but adoring father, the local doctor, but when an admirer tries to declare his love for Molly, Dr. Gibson becomes alarmed and decides he needs to remarry so Molly can have a stepmother to guide her into womanhood. Unfortunately, he chooses quickly, without getting to know his intended bride, a widowed governess named Clare Kirkpatrick, and finds he may have introduced more trouble than joy into his daughter’s life. Clare’s daughter Cynthia, about Molly’s own age but of a very different temperament, also comes to live with them; while she and Molly soon become close, Cynthia is guarding secrets that will impact all their lives.

I really enjoyed reading this book and, as always, marvelled at how a novel written in a past century can convey nuances of attitudes, social mores, and class differences in a way that even the best historical novelists recreating the past can never quite manage. Like the other Gaskell novel I’ve read, North and South, I found this to be a great read.

The Welsh Princes Trilogy, by Sharon Kay Penman

This one was a re-read for me, of a favourite series that I first read many years ago, sometime in my 20s. Sharon Kay Penman has been for many years one of my favourite authors of historical fiction, and when she died in January of this year at age 75, I knew it was time to revisit this early trilogy.

One of Penman’s areas of genius, from her earliest works to her last, was writing about those historical people and eras that are less well known to the casual student of history. She made her name with a first book about Richard III, one of my all-time favourite novels (The Sunne in Splendour). But for the massive trilogy that formed her second major work, she chose the reigns of three English kings less often covered in fiction — King John, his son Henry III, and Henry’s son Edward I. And while each of these kings plays a major role in this three-generations saga, the focus is on three men who are not English kings — Llywyllen Fawr (the Great) of Wales, his grandson Llwyllen ap Gruffydd, and the French rebel who tried to reform England’s system of government, Simon de Montfort. Even more, perhaps, the story brings us into the lives of the women who tied these men’s stories together: Joan or Joanna of Wales, daughter of King John who was married to the Welsh prince Llywyllen Fawr; her half-sister Eleanor (Nell), who married Simon de Montfort, and Simon and Nell’s daughter Ellen, who married the younger Prince Llywyllen.

This is a huge story, genuinely deserving to be called an epic, has a scope that sweeps from the mountains of Wales to a brief stay in the Middle East during the Crusades, but most of the action takes places in England and in Wales, as the smaller country continues its long and ultimately futile struggle to remain independent of its larger neighbour. Against the broad sweep of the bigger historical stories — the two Llywyllens’s efforts to keep their country free of English rule, and de Montfort’s valiant attempt to limit the powers of the English king (he is often credited with calling the first English parliament) — are the equally compelling personal stories. The love stories of all three couples, and the portrayals of three women exercising what influence is allowed them in patriarchal society, are as compelling as any of the battles and rebellions. Every character is vividly drawn, whether the details are taken from chroniclers’ records or Penman’s vivid imagination. She was a consummate researcher, but also brilliant at filling in the gaps that historians did not record — which often concerned women’s lives, and the private relationships between people whose public deeds were a matter of record.

Know My Name, by Chanel Miller

Know My Name is powerful story of sexual assault and survival by a woman whose words had already had a powerful impact before anyone knew her name. Chanel Miller is the woman raped by Brock Turner; the story made headlines across North America, as did the disgustingly short sentence Turner was given and the way media coverage focused on the rapist’s potential and the damage to his future, rather than the harm done to his victim. When the woman he assaulted, known at the time only as “Emily Doe,” released a powerful, searing victim impact statement that struck a chord with readers around the world, she began reclaiming her own power in a situation that so often leaves woman powerless. With the publication of her memoir, Chanel Miller made the difficult decision to make her identity public and tell the whole story, not only in her words but under her own name. She is a brilliant, amazing young writer. It’s horrific that things like this happen; it’s a small blessing for other victims of assault when survivors like Miller are able to articulate so clearly and in such compelling language what harm was done to them.

Know My Name brought up comparisons, for me, to another memoir I read almost 14 years ago and don’t recall all the details of — Alice Sebold’s Lucky. The interesting contrasts, for me, were in the fact that Sebold, as a young college rape victim, was considered “lucky” because she was the rare young woman who fits the profile of the “perfect” rape victim — a virgin assaulted by a stranger while walking across campus, who was able to fight back, had scars to show she had fought, and immediately reported the assault and followed the legal process through to her rapist’s conviction. Chanel Miller, on the other hand, inhabited the messier reality where most sexual assaults take place — she got drunk at a party, passed out, and was raped by Turner, whose assault was interrupted when two passersby saw what was happening and chased him away. Miller woke up in hospital with no memory of the assault, making her unable to testify to the details of what happened and making it possible (though unconvincing) for Turner and his defense team to argue that she consented.

Comparing the stories of these two young women decades apart, it’s disheartening to realize how little has changed; how the process of trying to get justice for a sexual assault is still demeaning and brutalizing for the victim, who has to undergo a second assault as her life is put on display in court to see if she is “good enough” to qualify as a victim. Out of the morass of this dehumanizing process, Chanel Miller speaks with a clear, wise, deeply human voice, reaching out to other survivors. This is an often difficult book to read, but it’s powerful and will linger with me for a long, long time.

Yellow Wife, by Sadeqa Johnson

I’ve read a lot of novels over the past few years about slavery and the African slave trade in the US and in the British colonies — Washington Black, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, The Water Dancer, The Long Song, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemmings, The Kitchen House. Some of these novels left a bigger impact on me than others, but what I really love is when a novel takes a piece of well-known history — like the horrors of chattel slavery — and brings to light some aspect or angle of the story I had never heard of before.

This was the case with Yellow Wife, the story of a young mixed-race enslaved girl who grows up believing the promise that her owner, who is also her biological father, will free her on her eighteenth birthday. What Pheby gets instead of freedom is tragedy and a shattering of the life she has known — not to mention the life she has hoped for.

Pheby ends up as the “yellow wife” — i.e., the mixed-race sex slave, essentially — of a white man who runs a jail where enslaved people are punished and sold. If you know anything about the history of slavery in the Americas, it’s not surprising that a man who demonstrated cruelty and utter contempt for Black people should keep a mixed-race woman in this position, establish her in his house as his mistress, and have several children with her — all while keeping her in the position of his legal property. What is, perhaps, surprising, is how common this practice was. In the novel, several other slave-traders in the same community also have “yellow wives,” and the author’s afterword reveals that, while Pheby’s story has fictional elements, she and the other enslaved “mistresses” in the novel (putting both “wife” and “mistress” in quotes because the story makes it clear there was nothing consensual about these relationships) are closely based on real women.

Of all the novels I have read about slavery, this one probably contains some of the most graphic detail about the torture endured by enslaved people. Pheby is a character the reader immediately wants to root for and hope that she will overcome the terrible situation she is placed in; the story’s outcome is encouraging enough to offer some hope but also realistic to the awful realities of that place and time. This was by no means an easy read but it was a very informative one.

The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel

This award-winning novel grabbed me more than I expected to when I started. It’s one of these stories where it’s hard to summarize what it’s “about” — I guess you could say it’s about a young woman named Vincent who marries a very wealthy older man, and when the man’s shady business dealings are brought to light, the fallout impacts not only his life and Vincent’s but those of many other people, whose stories unfold, not always chronologically, throughout this book. Seeing how all the pieces of the story fit together was frustrating at first but quickly became engrossing.

One thing I really liked in this novel was the idea of our lives as the different “countries” we inhabit. Vincent thinks of her marriage as the time when she enters “the country of money,” where people live differently and the everyday concerns of getting by no longer apply. But there are other countries — the country of loss and grief, the country of poverty, the country of addiction — and different characters in the novel move in and out of these various countries. I found this novel hard to describe, but a really engaging read.

Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje

It’s a struggle, with me and Michael Ondaatje. Years and years ago, when lots of people I knew were reading and raving about In the Skin of a Lion, I gave it a shot and, I’ll be honest with you, I did not know what was going on at any point in the book. I was just reading words but could not tell you anything about the plot and characters. I’m sad to say The English Patient was much the same way for me; only after I watched the movie was I able to go back, re-read the book, and actually follow the plot. I did love Running in the Family, which is non-fiction, but I was forced to conclude that Ondaatje’s fiction, which is absolutely beautifully written, was just not in a style that I could wrap my head around. Too much attention to language, leaving me to struggle to grasp plot and character. But I have always seen this as a deficiency in me as a reader, not in Ondaatje as a writer. I didn’t even try Anil’s Ghost; started Cat’s Table and couldn’t get into it.

Why, then, did I pick up Warlight? The synopsis sounded interesting; it was on a great sale at the ebook-store, and I guess I really wanted there to be one Michael Ondaatje novel I could read and enjoy. It sat on my e-reader for a long time until one late night when I couldn’t sleep and my current book was a paper book, so I didn’t want to turn on the light and wake Jason. I searched through the e-reader app for unread books and Warlight popped up. I started it and, to my surprise, was instantly engaged with the story. No trouble telling who they characters are or what’s happening in the first section of this novel.

Warlight begins with two teenagers, the narrator Nathaniel and his sister Rachel, in post-WW2 London. Their parents are going away for awhile, they’ve been told, and both are being sent to nearby boarding schools. Their home will be looked after by a friend of the family the children don’t know well, a man they come to call “The Moth,” who will be there when they come home from school on weekends. As both Nathaniel and Rachel hate boarding at school, both soon return to being day students and are under the full-time supervision of the enigmatic Moth and his friend, a former boxer and current smuggler they call The Darter. When they uncover evidence that their parents’ — specifically, their mother’s — disappearance is not everything they were led to believe, things take a darker turn.

That’s Part One of the book — covering a year or two in Nathaniel’s and Rachel’s young lives, whether they enter into the shadowy and mysterious worlds of their guardians. That part of the book ends with a shattering climax and an unexpected return — and then we jump ten years ahead, and then, in a third part, many years earlier to their mother’s girlhood.

I definitely would have preferred the story to move forward in a linear way after the end of Part One, without the time jumps — I’m not at all opposed to telling stories in non-linear fashion, but it didn’t seem to work well here, skipping over and omitting some of the parts of the story I was most interested in. Nathaniel’s mother’s past as a spy is certainly interesting, as is the web of connections between her and the various, possibly-criminal figures who inhabited their home during her absence — but the way in which all this was revealed didn’t, for me, have the immediacy and drama of the first part of the book. The writing is beautiful though, and it is the first Ondaatje book that I’ve really felt engaged and caught up in while reading — so perhaps there’s hope for me yet.