Claire Hennessy's Blog, page 13

Book Review: Twenty Boy Summer

Twenty Boy Summer was Ockler’s first novel – she’s published five more since, including the utterly gorgeous Bittersweet, made of ice hockey and cupcakes – and despite the cutesy title and premise – two best friends decide they’ll meet twenty boys each on their summer vacation! – it’s much more layered than that.

Anna has been Frankie’s best friend forever, but this is the first time she’s been invited on holidays with the family – because everything’s different now. A year ago, Frankie’s brother Matt died suddenly, and Anna’s been the strong one for her friend. Frankie is dramatic, confident, flirtatious and just a tiny bit out of control; Anna’s the sensible one keeping everything together. Frankie decides Anna needs to lose her virginity this summer. Anna doesn’t mention that she’s still caught up on the first boy she ever loved – Matt.

Meeting cute boys seems like fun – but also not anything Anna can take too seriously. Does falling for someone new mean forgetting Matt? And how long can she keep this secret from her closest friend in the world? A dreamy and thoughtful summer romance and meditation on friendship and loss for fans of Sarah Dessen and Deb Caletti.

Book Review: All We Shall Know

Is it possible for a book to be both hauntingly beautiful and deeply depressing? Melody Shee is a bright, educated woman in a stifling small Irish town, where modernity – her elderly father figuring out how to make coffee from videos online – and oppressive tradition collide. She first ‘lost her reason’ at fourteen, at her mother’s funeral, seeing the lie of rosary beads threaded through her still, pale hands; now at thirty-three she is often on shaky ground, contemplating suicide in the early days of her pregnancy.

This is her fourth pregnancy, the only one not to end in blood and pain and an ever-increasing distance between herself and Pat, her husband and childhood sweetheart. It is also not Pat’s child, which the community quickly discover. What they don’t know is that the father is Martin Toppy, a seventeen-year-old Traveller Melody was teaching how to read. What they don’t know is that Pat is not alone in the town in his frequenting of prostitutes – not that anyone wants to hear this, when there’s a woman to judge and shame.

Melody judges herself harshest of all, despite occasional moments of defiance; she frequently refers to herself as a bitch of various kinds and sees herself as a sinner in need of redemption. She is still haunted by the small-town politics, and the betrayal of a best friend that ended in a suicide. This is a place of dark secrets, of things not quite said, of horribleness. It is a place of both allegedly ‘respectable’ sorts and the rowdier Traveller community, getting involved in violent family feuds – a place that has been touched by the technology but not the social changes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

So it is depressing, but also beautifully written and observed; the dialect is particularly strong and Melody, for all that she might be viewed as an unsympathetic heroine, is shockingly real and relatable.

Book Review: Making Babies

I do not want to have children. Yes, yes, they’re adorable and cute and oh the most rewarding thing you’ll ever experience, but they are also exhausting and frustrating and boring a great deal of the time and you need to have a fierce love to get you through that. There is a mysticism and sentimentality around child-rearing that is most irritating, so I am always drawn to books that tear down the bullshit.

And, oh, tear down the bullshit Enright does, in her sharp and often hilarious way, although this account of pregnancy, childbirth and early childhood is also tender in places. This is a collection of essays about loving your kids, being fascinated by them, worrying about them – but also about the everyday hassles and the larger societal pressures and expectations. We still expect things from ‘mothers’ that we don’t from ‘fathers’. There’s a beautiful list of things children will eventually forgive their fathers for – but never forgive their mothers for.

‘Enjoyed’ might be a strange word to use about a book that depicts what is in many ways an alien experience to me but it’s so gorgeously written and cleverly observed that even at its bleakest – and there’s an account of a depressive breakdown in there – there are lines and phrases and thoughts to admire.

Reviews elsewhere

Some recent bookish pieces:

an interview with the very cool and lovely Jacqueline Wilson about films, retellings, the Victorians, and social media
the best swoon-worthy but also real romances in YA novels (hint: we are so over love triangles and insta-love)
what booksellers and critics are saying about the importance of Philip Pullman’s work, with a new trilogy kicking off this autumn
the best children’s and YA titles of this month, ranging from books about dog-robots to ones about alcohol-abusing teenagers

Book Review: 3

Hannah Moskowitz fearlessly dives right into topics that scare other writers off, so that she’s recently self-published a pet project of hers – a YA novel about polyamory – is not too surprising. It does, alas, feel a little rushed into publication and especially in need of a copy-edit, which is distracting.

The premise: new girl Taylor and her mom have just moved in with her mom’s fiancé, Dominic, and his young daughter. Taylor adores Dom – she’s happy about having a family – but the move does mean leaving behind her best friend.

Enter two new friends, the outcasts at school – quirky, adorable Theo and the impossibly-accomplished Josey. Taylor falls for Theo, but pulls back when she realises he’s in a relationship. As it turns out, their relationship is one open to the idea of a third party – and although Taylor initially turns them down, she can’t quite stop thinking about them, especially Theo.

Even though this is very much a defence of polyamory, the novel still explores the potential difficulties – feelings of jealousy and insecurity about the other parties. I did find the set-up a bit uncomfortable – it’s always another girl that they invite into their relationship, and the girl/girl side of things is pitched as emotional rather than romantic or sexual. Taylor does love Josey, but it feels more sisterly than anything else. (I do not find Theo charming enough to believe that two fabulous girls are into him.)

Books about underrepresented issues are always tricky – they shouldn’t have to be perfect or thorough on their particular topic and yet it feels as though they must be. I didn’t love this as much as I’d hoped, but a Taylor/Josey makeout scene probably would’ve have tipped the balance for me. Sequel…?

Book Review: Sisters and Lies

Two sisters, not nearly as close as they should be. Rachel is a writer used to being in the public eye – having written about her abortion as a teenager, for example, she still gets hate mail from religious types and men who’d prefer she shut up – while Evie, the artistic one, the gifted one, works an office job she doesn’t care about and has just been in an accident that’s left her in a coma.

When Rachel travels to London to be at Evie’s side, she discovers a strange man, Donnagh, living in Evie’s flat. They are only a few weeks into a relationship but already he seems to know quite a lot about Evie – except that what he knows doesn’t match up with the truth that Rachel knows.

As Rachel tries to discover what’s happened in Evie’s life to drive her to what everyone insists is a suicide attempt, Evie relates the last few months to us – and her long-standing connection with Donnagh, who doesn’t recognise her as the girl he bullied at school.

This is a psychologically astute and gripping novel with two very relatable narrators. I enjoyed it immensely.

Book Review: Real Artists Have Day Jobs

‘Real Artists Have Day Jobs!’ declares the first offering in Sara Benincasa’s collection of short, sharp, funny essays – 52 in all. In a world where pursuing your art is so often linked to ‘quitting the day job’, this is a smart and reassuring reminder of how difficult that is, and how unnecessary, too. Like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, it acknowledges that commitment to creativity can be woven into an everyday life – that ‘true artists’ don’t necessarily need to choose between living in poverty or selling out (because hard work is a prerequisite but not guarantee of financial success or even stability).

Benincasa tackles a number of topics apart from creativity, including anxiety (I raced off to read Agorafabulous!, her memoir, as soon as I finished this), mental health, physical health, good sex, bad sex, feminism, friendship, comedy, public speaking, career mentors, and more. She’s smart but low-bullshit – encouraging self-care without ever getting overly spiritual or hippie-dippy about it. She’s funny, and she’s warm. Reading this book was one of the most useful things I did for my mental health in 2016. Highly, highly recommend.

Book Review: The Next Best Thing

Twenty-eight-year-old Ruth is living the dream. After several years in Hollywood – living with her grandmother, who’s taken care of her since the car crash that killed her parents and left Ruth with a scarred face and body – her pilot has been picked up. And even though she knows this is only the first step, that so many things can go wrong, she realises: this is it. This is her moment.

From the beginning, her sitcom The Next Best Thing is shaped into something completely different to what Ruth imagined. A Jewish heroine who’s not a stick figure becomes . . . a skinny blonde. The nuanced portrayal of an older woman in the form of the grandmother – based on Ruth’s own – becomes a joke. And throughout, the sexism of TV-making is noted, as Ruth struggles to reconcile her dream-come-true with her artistic integrity. (Though at no point does she use the words ‘artistic integrity’, worry not.)

Jennifer Weiner was the creator of a short-lived TV series of her own, lending this novel an appealing authenticity and behind-the-scenes-gossip feel. Readable, smart and fun – this is one of her best.

Reviews elsewhere

From last Saturday’s Irish Times (January 21st), reviews of the following picture books and YA novels:

Jodie Parachini and Daniel Rieley’s This is a Serious Book

Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Benji Davies’s Also An Octopus

Francesca Simon’s The Monstrous Child

Katherine Webber’s Wing Jones

Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap

(I’ve been getting very excited about the ukelele-playing octopus trying to build a rocket ship. As you do.)

Book Review: How To Murder Your Life

I’m worried about Cat Marnell. I guess I don’t need to be. She’s doing okay. She’s a rich, thin, blonde woman living in New York who’s been paid very well for writing a memoir about her time in the beauty-magazine industry and her addiction to drugs (prescription and otherwise). But I’m worried about her all the same.

And that, I guess, is what makes this book work – yes, she’s damn privileged, and she knows it. But she is also very, very human. And it’s tricky not to be horrified when reading about her adolescence, a time when her sister was shipped off to a ‘boarding school’ (really: institution) for the most minor of infractions and her parents had no respect for her privacy. She acknowledges that she was messing up in school, and out at music gigs a lot, but even so, the flippant tone doesn’t make it all any less dysfunctional.

Then she’s off to boarding school herself, where she’s eventually diagnosed with attentive-deficit disorder. Being medicated for this makes her smart, brilliant, productive – at first. It’s also the beginning of an addiction – and Marnell’s account perfectly explains why. If you’re high-functioning when medicated – and it’s on prescription, at that! – why not push it further?

And pushing it further is rewarded in certain worlds, as she interns and then works within various beauty publications in New York after graduation. If you’re looking the part and doing the work – and doing it better, faster, harder than others – then who cares how you’re doing it? Like Bryony Gordon’s Mad Girl, this memoir highlights just how acceptable drug use is in certain fields – up to a point. And how much the media will eat up stories of troubled young women because hey, it sells.

Yes, there is something a little uncomfortable about someone who’s been exploited by the media for her dysfunctional lifestyle then going on to write a memoir about it all, but her account of writing this book is eventually a joyful one. She’s done rehab several times and is still not quite off drugs, but is managing it better – which is an interesting variation on the standard ‘and now I only drink my green tea and my body is a temple’ ending for addiction memoirs.

I also realised that I am aged and decrepit when I found her description of working in glossy magazines by day, glamorous (and then less glamorous) partying by night, absolutely exhausting. Go have a nice cup of tea and stay in and watch something on the TV! But, no – she’s out there. Living dangerously. And the extent to which she’s exposed her life here is dangerous, too – but brave. And honest. I’d love her to write a novel next. Fingers crossed.

How To Murder Your Life is published on February 2nd.