The Emperor’s Winding Sheet – Jill Paton Walsh

Posted on 14/12/2019 by Roseanna

511qgynbz6l._sx310_bo1204203200_For my birthday, I got several (but not actually that many) books. Most of them were new, but then I also got one that came slightly later than the rest, and obviously second hand. It had no note, but I knew exactly who it was from, because she’d talked about loving it herself as a child, and wondered if I’d enjoy it too, despite only coming to it as an adult.

I was slightly concerned – I don’t have a good track record as an adult reading stuff pitched at kids and teens that I did not myself interact with as a kid or teen – but as it turns out, I didn’t need to be in the slightest. It was not just a little bit my thing – it did the full superhero landing into the wreckage of what was once my wheelhouse. Sometimes stuff feels like it was perfectly pitched to make you, yes you right there, extremely happy, and this was absolutely that. Had I come across it as a child or teen I would undoubtedly have loved it too, but the joy was not undimmed by my now advanced old age. I don’t know, I think maybe I appreciated it more for having a Classics degree and a broader liking for literature about emotions behind me. It doesn’t matter. I loved it. I adored it. I want to evangelise about it, throw it at people’s heads, push it into their hands. Only I won’t, because I’ll only be sad when they don’t love it as much as I do. Such is the sadness of the books we love the most.

Anyway, I should actually tell you what book it is.

It’s called The Emperor’s Winding Sheet, by Jill Paton Walsh (whom you may recall from some Truly Excellent detective fiction), and it follows a small boy who is pulled along into the retinue of the emperor for the events surrounding the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. I mean, I guess that’s a spoiler. But it happened a good 500+ years ago now so frankly you’ll cope. At its heart, it’s another take on “big events in history from a small perspective”, which has been done more than once and well. In some ways, it’s the entirety of GGK’s oeuvre. And like GGK, Paton Walsh has latched onto sadness as her overriding theme. And, like GGK, it’s the good kind of sadness, where it absolutely wrecks your heart but you can’t bear to put it down and not keep reading.

Unlike Kay, I think she focusses more closely in one theme – that of doomed courage in the face of oblivion – and instead of adding more and more to compound upon it, just sings this one tune extremely sweetly. She doesn’t overdo it, but instead gives it space to shine, and for the full force of the oblivion the city is facing to settle into the reader, so they can’t help but feel for those trapped in Constantinople. And to some extent, I think the situation of the siege and the fact she sticks to that one note of sadness work particularly well together – like those living through it, you are forced to reckon with the ongoing and unrelenting reality of their doom as it steadily approaches. There’s no escaping it, and all distractions from it are fleeting, leading inexorably back to the imminent ruin of their whole world.

Of course, to do that, you need to feel some amount of compassion for the characters. Luckily, she’s manage to create a good range of charming, charismatic and fully sympathetic figures to people her Constantinople. The viewpoint character’s changing appreciation of the world he’s in is not only well drawn, but feels particularly accurate for the way a child would see and feel the world. His keeper, the servant to the emperor, is also a fascinating study in loyalty and compassion for a child pulled into events beyond his understanding. But for me, it is the emperor himself who is the most fascinating and heart-wrenching. Because of her focus on him as the avatar of the failing empire, she draws some beautiful parallels between his emotions and what happens to the world around him. But fundamentally, because of being who he is, the second son never meant to lead, knowing all the way that he is the last of the line, that nothing he can do can really change what’s happening but he has to try anyway… I think you’d need a heart of stone not to feel for him.

The descriptions of the life of a town under siege – especially the brief glimpses of temporary happiness always tainted by the ultimate doom – as well as trying to give a good but child-friendly description of the religious conflicts at play, and how they might seem to someone who wasn’t steeped in them from childhood are poignant and skilful. She spends the right amount of time (i.e. not all that much) on actual fighting, so we never get battle scene fatigue – battles are a way of moving the real story of human suffering along, not the story itself. Which, at least for me, is as it should be.

The descriptions also just of the world, the settling of a historical period as a “real” place the characters inhabit, are well done. She’s obviously done a lot of research but doesn’t feel the need to flaunt it page by page. It’s once again in service to the character story and the creation of an atmosphere, rather than the focus.

Fundamentally, I loved this because it hit me right in the feels. The sadness of a doomed empire full of brave people who know they’ll die defending it but go to that fate willingly is… well, it’s a theme people do for a reason. It really hits home. And it does that because she makes the people ones you’ll care about. Not to bang the drum I always do, but PEOPLE. CHARACTERS. REAL HUMAN STORIES. That’s what needs to be good, and that’s what’s good here. Also DOOM. Did I mention the doom? Lots of doom. Don’t read it if you’re already sad. But do read it at some point. It’s beautiful.

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Blood, Water, Paint – Joy McCullough

Posted on 22/11/2019 by Roseanna

91ctfqgpq9lI’ve mentioned before that I don’t really read YA, and it’s not like my last foray into it was… without regret. But I had Blood, Water, Paint recommended to me by someone whose taste I trust, and it was in verse rather than prose and… I really like Artemisia Gentileschi. I am capable of going outside my comfort zone, for the right incentives of cool historical lady artists.

As it turns out, this one was worth it, but I don’t think this says anything about my feelings on YA as a whole*. Some books, the theme/content/idea is good enough that it’s worth powering through stuff that maybe isn’t for you. And in this case, putting the whole thing in verse did actually deal with a lot of my usual issues with YA, as did the focus on a single historical figure and a historical narrative.

But that’s by the by. I liked it, regardless of what subgenre it’s in.

If you don’t know about Artemisia Gentileschi, a) you should, she’s great and b) go fix that and read up about her. (Ignore this paragraph if you want to read the book without me spoiling it with details of her life – I don’t think it matters as I knew it all going in, but ymmv). She was born in 1593, the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, a Tuscan painter, and was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence. She painted some amazing, vivid and intensely emotional scenes, and her focus is often on female figures and their suffering, making them convincing and human in a way often not managed by her contemporaries. Her most famous works are probably Susanna and the Elders and Judith Slaying Holofernes (both biblical stories focussing on women who suffered through hardship and ultimately prevailed). She was also, as a young woman, raped by an artist associating with her father, and was for a long time notable for her participation in his trial and ultimate conviction – as part of which she underwent torture with thumbscrews to verify her testimony. As such, somewhat trigger warning for the book for vivid description/reflection on rape, and less vivid description of physical torture.

But you can see from that why I’d want to read a novel about her? As a woman not just trying but succeeding with solid success to be an artist in the early 1600s, that’s just… wow. And doubly so one whose work I suspect if you saw it would be somewhat familiar. We don’t have as many stories we should of female historical success, and it’s great to embrace the ones that do survive. Even if, as this one is, it’s tainted with a very familiar female story of suffering.

The novel focusses on her early life, before she left for Florence, and her growth as an artist rather than just her father’s apprentice. In that at least, it is very YA – it looks at her life as a young adult, and deals with themes of parent-child relationships and living in the shadow of expectations. But the style of the verse also drags it well away from that – it’s a deeply introspective, thoughtful book, full of observation and details, trying to show not just in description but in form the identity of Gentileschi as an artist. And yet, it’s also very pared down verse. It’s simple, short and sectioned off, highly impactful but brief each time. It makes it a quick – albeit slightly harrowing – book to read, and I think that’s somewhat from necessity. You couldn’t drag a whole lifetime out like this, it would be too much, too heavy, too constant in tone. But by focussing it on this particular arc of her life – and indeed a very heavy and dramatic one – it feels entirely sensible to keep the tone as it is, because it matches the subject matter.

And there are moments of variation – we split off into prose occasionally for reflections on her dead mother – but they are few and far between, and definitely serve only as brief contrasts, rather than a substantial section of the book.

Again because of the short, impactful verse format, and the intensely autobiographical way it’s written, we see only Gentileschi herself in any real depth. Her father and Tassi are somewhat caricatured, because they’re seen only in how they relate to her, never any depth of their own. But she gets a rich, complex inner life. And I’m cool with it. We’re centring the narrative of a woman in the 1600s, as well as the narrative of the victim of a crime. Exclude everyone else, I’m fine with this. It’s not something that always works, but here, where we want a young woman’s voice to carry through over the noise of men in power trying to silence here, it’s not just good but right, I think.

It does also feel very much like an authentically portrayed young woman, which is nice. She feels very real, with real, teenage emotions.

And I don’t know how historically accurate it is to have that be so parallel to modern teenagers. I also don’t know how historically accurate the details of the book are. The broad strokes? Yep, all good. Those bits I know. But with historical novels, there will always be details the author simply cannot know, and you have to rely on them filling them in in a way that feels like it works, rather than necessarily being scrupulously researched accuracy for every. single. thing. Some research. Basic accuracy, especially on things we can and do know. But you need to know where to draw the line and just make it a good story – which it definitely feels like McCullough has. I never felt unsure of how accurate it was, which is good enough for me on this one**.

It captured the feel of what I wanted, and the feel of being inside the mind of a woman I find fascinating. I couldn’t cope with every novel being like this, but every now and then? It was lovely. The writing was great, the character compelling and the story and subject matter stuff I was already primed to be engaged with. Very definitely worth it for the feminist history stuff.

*I keep tangentially referring to this, so maybe I should just do a post about it? I have a lot of opinions.
**Yes I know if it were a book about Romans I’d be singing an entirely different song here but I’m just a massive hypocrite, ok?

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Period Piece – Gwen Raverat

Posted on 19/11/2019 by Roseanna

35237516._sy475_Another birthday present – and another one I’d never have picked up for myself but am really glad to have read. Although it had the downside of MAJOR NOSTALGIA. I had to intersperse it with reading something else because of the nostalgia related sads. Alas.

The book is an autobiographical account of the author’s childhood in Cambridge, as the granddaughter of Darwin and the child of a Cambridge academic and an American socialite. It’s an interesting picture of a strange and insular world of the late 19th century, made stranger by how similar and relatable it is to the one I lived in for four years in the early 21st. Apparently time is for other towns, I guess?

It’s a weird sort of book, a very specific snapshot into a world that only sort of still exists, and that was kind of its appeal? It’s a world where you can definitely still see significant pieces of it even now, Cambridge is still so very Cambridge, and yet at the same time, parts of it are so totally alien to the modern world, it makes it all alien. And because it’s told as the very personal experience of a childhood, you get all those idiosyncracies of the late Victorian period suddenly very… there. Weird ideas about child-rearing and socialising and marriage and all sorts, just told as normal, and yet with the eye of someone who lived through the wars looking back and judging them by contemporary views as well. Even the author sees them as strange and yet not strange, and so you manage to sit comfortably alongside her, being baffled, even as she talks about it as normal. It makes her a very compelling narrator.

She also has such a charming and down to earth way of speaking, it’s hard not to get along. It’s all very no-nonsense, things just were and she’ll tell them as such, with an eye for amusing details and things which make a good story, despite being homely and cosy and just so… normal seeming. It’s not a grand childhood, it’s just… her life. Being told like one would tell the amusing stories of any family.

The author also provides illustrations to go alongside her thoughts, and they have so much the feel of a Victorian story book, it adds to the homeliness of the whole thing. Are they the best art I’ve ever seen? No. Are they absolutely the right art for the story? Yes.

But it’s not all larks and fun – Raverat has a lot of sadness and self-doubt in there about her childhood, and as all of this is slowly revealed, in her dry, self-deprecating way, one cannot help but feel a lot of sympathy and understanding for her. She speaks as someone who seems to have come into themself quite late, and be happy in herself now, but only after a very long and difficult road. And that’s quite relatable I guess? Being the odd child out at school, concerns about fitting in and feeling awkward are just… very easy themes to latch onto, but she tells them well and gently, never hammering anything in, so it just feels naturally part of the story as she tells it. She’s happy at times, sad at times, but fundamentally clearly glad to have grown out of that time in her life.

I really enjoyed it as a window into the lived experience of a period I know a lot about generally, but that I’ve not really read much about in terms of real lives, and in a town I feel like I know quite well, but in enough of the past for it to be quite different while recognisable. A strange sort of uncanny valley of a book, but a deeply enjoyable and fascinating one.

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Monstress Vol. 4: The Chosen – Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda

Posted on 05/11/2019 by Roseanna

814etpqjpzlGonna be a short one. Tl;dr version – still amazing, still beautiful, still fascinating.

Storywise, I think they’re doing a great job of balancing providing answers and asking more questions. They haven’t got into the soggy middle-ground of keeping on puzzling us and puzzling us until they’ve painted a corner-of-info-dump for themselves. There’s a strong thread of solving some things, but just that leads on to more questions that make sense, that naturally follow from what you know. It’s the most satisfying (and I imagine hardest) thing to do for middle books of a long series. They also do a great job of making characters sufficiently memorable that you can still connect to them even when it’s been a while since they got page time, as well as getting you up to speed on new ones quickly and effectively. There’s a fairly major new character in this volume (yeah, him what’s on the cover), but I felt like we got over the “who what” part very quickly and could start getting into how he fits into the world and the story much better, which is the meatier stuff anyway.

And there’s not much to say about the art I haven’t said before – it remains stunning. There are pages I do just want to stare at for a little bit, and the colour palette remains deeply atmospheric and effective. It’s a gorgeous world, even in the horrible bits, and manages to do grim and vicious alongside cute without it being jarring. The fox child can live in the same world as the tentacle monster and it feels aesthetically acceptable. And there’s so much detail. I could easily come back and spot things in backgrounds I never had before – so much appreciation for building such a coherent aesthetic that gets worked right in, even unto the patterns on wall-hangings.

So yeah, the standard is stunningly consistent. Woo. I’ll keep pre-ordering the trades then (and praying to any god that’ll listen that they keep on making them).

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The Mythic Dream – edited by Dominik Parisien, Navah Wolfe

Posted on 05/11/2019 by Roseanna
43822066

Yes, I absolutely was also a sucker for this beautiful cover… I should totally have bought the hardback instead.

It’s been aaages since I read a short story collection, but what better way to draw me back than a bunch of authors I think are great writing their takes on myths? I mean, how better were you going to lure me in than getting Ann Leckie to write about Sekhmet but in space-future? Needless to say, I absolutely loved it.

I possibly enjoyed it more than the last collection I read, because it had that uniting theme, rather than the theme being “all by this one author”. And it introduced me to some people I hadn’t heard of before – I’ll definitely be looking out for Indrapramit Das again. But I think that having that central theme running them all together, and having each author explain their choice in a little snippet after their story made it extra-good. I really liked seeing the thought processes behind the choices, after I’d drawn my own conclusions from reading the stories, and seeing how all the different authors took the theme in their own directions.

Of course, one will always pick favourites. I think mine are Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, Indrapramit Das and Amal El-Mohtar’s stories… and Amal El-Mohtar prooooobably tops the list there. They didn’t all pick myths I knew, but they each made something strange and compelling out of the old, and took it in directions that felt like they made something really worthwhile out of the story. In the stories I liked, there’s a strong run of feminist takes (which is always a great thing to be doing with myths) as well as LGTBQing* them (likewise) but the same is just true of the book as a whole. And I think that’s one of the great strengths of reinterpreting mythology – you can make something both entirely new and totally the same by changing small but key elements. You can find new meaning that nonetheless totally gels with the spirit of the original. Or flips it on its head. Either is super fun.

I’m not going to talk too much about the content of the stories – I feel like it kind of ruins something so small to be talked over if you’ve not read them. If you’re even slightly inclined to like mythic rewrites and vaguely trust my opinion? Just go read it, it’s fucking great.

What I will talk about is the story that surprised me.

I’ve already mentioned Indrapramit Das – he wrote a story in the collection called Kali_Na, which he describes as being cyberpunk. If you’ve discussed books with me basically ever, you know I hate cyberpunk. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything cyberpunk I even tolerated, let alone liked. But this sort of thing is exactly why I’m glad the author notes are after the stories. I didn’t read that and go in going “uggghghhh no”. I just read the story. And I loved it. It’s one of my favourites in the whole collection, and I think one of the best “moderning” of a myth I’ve seen in a while. He’s taken a story I knew, and remade it for a very near future, and made it relevant in the same and yet different ways, and with a real message in it, and hope. Definitely hope. And as soon as I read the author note, I realised that yes, of course it’s cyberpunk. Obviously it is. I should have twigged it myself. But I was so busy enjoying the story, I never stopped to think about it.

Which isn’t me admitting I’ve been wrong about cyberpunk all along, by the way. My issues with it generally remain entirely valid – as a subgenre it’s bigoted as all fuck, and has a really very problematic relationship with women and their objectification by near-universally straight white male protagonists – but I loved this one, and precisely because it didn’t do all the crap I’ve come to associate with the genre, I didn’t think about it in terms of its genre classification, and just got on with loving it. But also, cyberpunk is often intrinsically pessimistic. Humanity has fucked the world and it’s all grim and terrible, very much the tone – and the excuse for people doing morally grey things because it’s a tough world for tough men making tough decisions, right? But this… isn’t like that. Like I said, it’s hopeful. And that made an enormous difference for me. It’s taking a near future and saying that yes, a lot of it may be terrible… but also good things can come from that too. From people, maybe. Or from luck. Or maybe something human created but somehow, by that luck, perhaps imbued with a tiny fragment of the divine. And that, more than anything, was something worth latching on to. It helps that the protagonist is a woman, there’s no ugly objectification and the story is one that empowers her. But mainly it’s that hope. Not optimism – that would be so out of tone for cyberpunk that I think it might throw it out of the genre altogether – but a tiny whiff of possibility.

And so if I have any praise for this collection at all – and I do, you may have noticed – it’s that. It gave me a story in a genre I hate, and made it wonderful. It made me connect to it and love it. And yeah, it did that with stuff I was pre-disposed to love too, which was great. And no, this wasn’t my favourite story of all of them. But it’s the most notable one, because it made me stop and think, and re-evaluate. It gave me an exception. And yeah, maybe a little bit of hope. Maybe not all cyberpunk is godawful (just most of it). Which is really nice.

Ok also, Arkady Martine rewrote two Sumerian myths. That was fucking awesome. FYI.

 

*Is there a verb for this? I wanted to say “gayifying” by the two Ys make it kinda yucky aesthetically and also the themes are broader LGBTQ anyway. Oh wait, “queering”. That’s the verb. Whoops.

Posted in All, Fantasy, History/Myth, Science Fiction | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

Posted on 05/11/2019 by Roseanna

41cnv7v38yl._sx322_bo1204203200_Something of a change of pace. This one was a book club book, for our theme “literary authors doing SFF”. I nominated it, so entirely my fault, but I’m not certain in hindsight I’d have picked it for that theme. It’s magical realism, and I’m not sure I think that’s SFF. I also don’t think I’d have picked it had wikipedia not lied to me about the length of the book (by just under 200 pages!), so regrets all round on that score. But I don’t regret that this spurred me onto reading it – I’ve been meaning to get round to some Rushdie for a good long while, what with him having won the Booker of Bookers and all, apparently some people think he’s good. And he also just feels like one of those authors I ought to have read. Which is sometimes a misleading impulse, because it’s often not really about how much I’m going to like the experience of reading a book, so much as wanting to be able to say I have read it. But here… nah, I’m cool with it. It’s not a fun book or an easy one, but I’m glad of the experience of reading it.

My primary experience of it, though, is that it’s hard work. It’s not a book that lets you have anything easily. You have to work at it, work at reading it, work at paying attention, and hope that the pay-off for doing so is worth it. For me, it was. But I can see how that balance would tip the other way for a lot of people, especially as there’s a lot in there that’s challenging on other levels too. It’s not a book trying to be liked universally, or do things the nice or easy way. It’s deeply critical of various things (including Indira Gandhi in ways that maybe… could have been less… strong), and is using the story heavily towards that critique.

But sometimes I enjoy having to work for my literature. Sometimes it is worth it. And I definitely found, once I’d got into it, that the difficult prose wasn’t a necessary obstacle to clamber over to get to the good stuff – it was part of the good stuff. It worked, and it contributed to what was worthwhile about the book. In the end, I can’t imagine having enjoyed it anywhere near as much were the prose less than what it is. Even across a LOT of pages. And it is a long, long, chonky-ass book.

It’s also definitely not for you if you want a pacy, plot driven romp. The protagonist isn’t even born until about page 300.

But if you like weird prose? If you like meandering ideas that somehow coalesce into something interesting and meaningful without you entirely noticing, and characters all described as overblown caricatures yet somehow resolving into coherent and necessary parts of the story? Absolutely. It’s definitely literature on hard mode, but in the best way.

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Children of Earth and Sky – Guy Gavriel Kay

Posted on 13/10/2019 by Roseanna

81hzuc0hezlIn a shock twist, GGK can still write beautiful stories that make people, especially this person, deeply sad about big, grand themes and also about little individual lives. This time with a lot of references harking back to his previous making me sad fun times. Double bonus sad points!

As with Tigana, the problem with reading more GGK near reading some GGK… is that I end up comparing it to GGK, rather than other, lesser novels. So getting that out of the way first, it’s definitely not his best. It still got 5 stars, I still loved it, but The Sarantine Mosaic books are better, as is Lions of Al-Rassan and Song for Arbonne. For all that I really enjoyed that it did so, this one spends a bit too long making little in joke references to his other books (primarily The Sarantine Mosaic ones, but also Lions) and if you haven’t read them, or maybe just not recently, it’s clear enough that he’s going “look! Look I did a thing!” in the moment that you’d know you were missing something, but just not know exactly what it was. And that would annoy me. Luckily, I’ve read them recently or remember them well, and also just *clutches at heart*. But some of them are references to fairly small things (there’s a little temple mentioned that gets visited on the road in Lord of Emperors, and there’s a brief discussion of the mosaic falling down, and then it gets briefly visited in this one, and again, mosaic falling down), so it would be quite easy to miss the links, I suspect. None of them affect your understanding of the plot, but there would definitely be some resonance and emotive links being lost. For me, worth it. But I read the books in the right order, so *shrug*. And yeah, I think it’s telling that it needs to link itself to his other novels – it’s almost like he knows it needs something to shore it up a little.

But… still five stars. And so much better than a lot of other books. I need to keep that part in mind (and just spread out reading his books, jeez). As ever, he really has the knack – and one I miss so much in some other, otherwise well constructed books – of getting a character weaselled right into your heart. And another one. It’s never just one. He makes each of his people valuable to you in some way. It’s not just that he makes them fully rounded people with their own internal lives and visible character (he does, and more people should be better at this), but there’s something more than that, something that makes them not just engaging but emotionally immediate. I have no idea really how he does it, but he consistently does, so I’ll consistently give him money to keep ripping my heart out.

Everything else… well, the other problem with me keeping on reading GGK books is they’re all good in the same ways. That’s not boring to me, because I’m reading them and they’re great. But it’s boring for you reading this, because I’m just going to praise all the same things again. He’s still good at worldbuilding (by nicking it from history). He’s still good at plotting (by nicking the big picture from history and filling in the small scale with compelling detail and humanity). His descriptive passages remain great at painting a great visual without spending too long distracting from the narrative. I always feel a really good sense of place and of the time we’re in with his work. He captures awe particularly well, for instance. Like he’s done in all of his other books. He always has great female characters with a variety of perspectives, as well as men, and he portrays all of them having reasonable and strong emotional responses to things. He manages the line between historical realism and “I don’t want to read about the horrific reality of the past all the time” really well.

Look, GGK. I’ll say nice things about you more eloquently if you stop being so damn consistent, ok? Write something wonderful in an entirely different way to all your other wonderful stuff, then we’ll talk.

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Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion, Fire and Beauty – Nikita Gill

Posted on 13/10/2019 by Roseanna

9781409173922Another poetry audiobook. Because this is clearly becoming a Thing.

To some extent, it’s an annoying thing, because my choice is severely limited to whichever poetry collections audible has… and it’s surprisingly few. I’d have expected they’d be a great thing to have as audio – they’re intrinsically a medium for reading aloud, for listening to and speaking. Poetry is just often better when spoke – I know I often speak bits of it quietly to myself when I’m getting it in book form. But apparently the good folks of audible disagree with me, so all the stuff I search for? Nah! (Relatedly, if you know of some good poetry that’s definitely available on audible, especially if it’s read by the author, do tell me – I’m not immensely picky about what it is, and am still trying to figure out what I do and don’t like in modern poetry, so anything goes. It does have to be via audible though, as I get a credit a month and also buying e.g. CDs is a faff). But I soldier on somehow, and basically end up with random stuff and see how I go. It worked out ok here.

Firstly, it turns out Nikita Gill has a really excellent reading voice. Like, properly lovely. It was an actual joy to listen to. This isn’t the main reason it’s good, but it did make it instantly appealing.

A lot of the subject matter here is very similar to Rupi Kaur’s milk and honey (though less rigidly structured). There’s a lot of stuff about empowerment, shame, trauma, survival, and just the life of being a woman. The poems are nearly all very very short, and when read in Gill’s quiet, measured tone of voice, you get a real amount of space around them to think them through. A lot of the issues she touches on feel vividly real to me – not all, but enough that it’s easy to see my own experiences in some of what she narrates, and it makes you feel close to the subject at hand. It’s not exactly a universality of experience, as it is often definitively female, but it feels like it’s drawing from a wide pool. She uses fairly simple language and ideas, in a quietly measured way, to give the sense of bigger things, rather than overcomplicating.

This is just going to sound like my Rupi Kaur review, isn’t it?

Well, I mean, I guess the problem is that what I liked about it is basically the same as what I liked about Milk and Honey, I just thought it did it slightly better. Not by a huge amount, it’s only the jump from four stars to five, but a bit better. Possibly the structural difference was the main thing. By not confining it to separate sections on each theme, there’s the need to wait and see what each poem ends up being about, which I think worked better. You have to wait and listen for the pay-off. There’s also more hope to Gill’s work – though it’s not entirely without darkness – and I found that easier to connect to (though of course that speaks more about my personal experiences than anything else). Gill is primarily writing with a thought towards growth and looking forwards, to getting past the bad and into the better, whereas Kaur is often writing about trauma itself, processing it. They’re both valid things to write about, but we connect with what we connect to, and for me, that’s more Gill’s work. Gill also speaks directly to the reader/listener, and works to create that bond in a way that Kaur does less, and which seemed to work well for me.

There’s nothing deeply complex here, but as with Kaur, I think its worth is in its simplicity. It’s accessible poetry, no need to get my pencil out and start doing scansion. And I like both things, but this is doing the simplicity well. And it’s good that poetry exists that doesn’t require a degree and three reference texts to read it. It’s good poetry for listening, for feeling to. Would definitely listen again.

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Little Fires Everywhere – Celeste Ng

Posted on 13/10/2019 by Roseanna

81zqjqhcotlThis was one of the exciting kind of books where you have no idea what it is before you read it. I’d seen the adverts on the tube (a while ago) but I’d never looked it up or come across it in another way. So when I was given it for my birthday, it was a mystery! I like that. Sometimes I think I enjoy books more when I let them tell me what they’re going to be, not my preconceptions. I can’t be disappointed when I have no expectations*. And even if not, the mystery of what genre it is is kinda fun. Letting the book surprise you. It’s just really nice.

And it’s even nicer when you really, really like the book. And when it’s really really well written, with great characters and complex relationships. That always helps.

Yes, this is one of those. As it turns out, it’s a book about people, and travelling, finding roots, and running away from things, and about teens and their parents, and the relationships between them, and about being poor but having rich friends, and seeing the world through the experience of others. All of these are pretty compelling as themes, but the joy comes in a writer really good at portraying fraught relationships from both sides, and giving both those sides very real reasons for how they behave. You see exactly why both sides of the argument behave as they do, and no matter that you may be taking a clear side, you’re very much prevented from seeing it as one-sided. However much the other mum does some terrible stuff, every time you see inside her head, you see exactly why she got through some totally reasonable thoughts to get there. Maybe you wouldn’t have got there yourself, but it’s not… completely out there. And then on the flip side, you have some teens. And it’s rare and lovely to see grumpy, surly teens being portrayed sympathetically and well in adult literature while being surly. Ng has made it really really easy to empathise with everyone and their perspectives, and so made a book in which the reader is pulled every which way by the various opinions of the characters, their own perspectives, and gets to feel the real sense of how difficult to navigate these problems can be.

And a lot of the problems in the book are pretty mundane. It’s not that she’s got a truly sensational and hilarious plot reeling you in. But she’s fully invested you in the tension of the (mostly) everyday, by making it deeply compelling. She manages to fully realise the drama of being a teen, of being an outsider, and make all those normal dramas almost as immediate to the reader as to the subject.

The basic plot follows and girl and her mother, who’ve been travelling most of the girl’s life for the mother’s art, settling in a town with a promise that this one will be long term. The girl then sets about making friends and building a life for herself in a way she’s never been able to in their ever-moving life up to now. She and her mother become part of life in the town, and the book is about their evolving relationship with the people they meet there, and particularly one family.

But I wasn’t really in it for the plot. As I’ve said, it’s the people. Her writing is wonderful, and manages to get to the heart of what her characters are thinking and doing, and feel very true to the soul of them, without going over the top and feeling like a teenager’s personal diary. Which I imagine is a harder line to walk than it looks. No one is boring, inside their own head, and she makes that deeply true. Everyone you get a glimpse of, even if only briefly, gets a realistic and honest internal life, that brings them to life even if they seem dull on the outside.

And that sucked me in enormously. I couldn’t put it down, and rushed through it in a couple of days. It’s absolutely not something I think I’d have picked up on my own, but I’m really glad to have read it, and it’s a reminder that there’s so much outside of the couple of genres I habitually read that’s worth reading, and that maybe I should expand more often. It’s hard, because there’s so much I want to read inside my genres too… but it’s so rewarding to find something new and wonderful, I should really push myself more often.

*This is a lie. I am absolutely capable of being disappointed by all sorts of things. I believe in my abilities. But I can’t be sad it isn’t the book I envisioned in my head, when it’s just a different, equally good book, if I don’t have some sort of platonic book ideal ready to compare it to.

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Milk and Honey – Rupi Kaur

Posted on 11/10/2019 by Roseanna

milk-and-honey-rupi-kaurI decided I wanted to engage with some more poetry. And I had a load of audible credits to use… so hey, why not in audio form. Free books (not free books, but I already paid, so it feels like free). Turns out, I am absolutely fine with audiobooks when they’re poetry. Maybe something to do with the rhythm helps keep me focussed and engaged where novels don’t manage it? I don’t know. But they do. So I’m going to exploit this until I run out of audible credits*. It possibly also helps that the poetry I’ve found so far (spoilers, there’s at least one more of these coming in the blogging soon) have been read by the author, and maybe that makes a difference?

That being said, the one thing I didn’t super get on with here was the voice. I got used to it eventually, but I am kinda funny about what accents I find easy or hard to listen to, and Kaur’s Canadian was grating on me slightly, so I could never relax into it as much as I wanted to. I had the same probably with The History of Rome podcast (which is legit excellent and I’ve listened to the whole thing at least once), but I could never quite get over how the guy doing it spoke. This is totally my problem, and it’s not bad… but it does mean podcasts are a bugger for me, because I want to find non-American accented ones**. And then yeah, if the poet is Canadian, she’s going to speak like a Canadian. But it was a minor thing, just a slight niggle at the back of my mind throughout. On the flip side, she also has a really lovely, emotive voice (and shockingly is really good at putting that emotion into her own poetry, go figure).

On the whole though, I really really enjoyed this one. It was a friend-rec, so I wasn’t super worried, but still. There’s a definite rhythm to how she speaks, and a slow, measured pace that forces me to really listen and engage with the words. I found myself skipping backwards a little sometimes, just to catch something again, think it over again, and that kind of slow contemplative tone is exactly what I want – it’s how I read written poetry, so getting it over in audio is really helpful. I never felt the urge to turn the speed up, like I do with novels, and enjoyed it as I had it… maybe there’s hope for me yet.

Kaur’s work is very accessible, and very immediately emotional. It’s not about obscuring meaning (I’m not against that), it’s putting it out there and available for the reader, rather than asking them to work for meaning. It’s not about ambiguity and puzzle. Instead, it’s about taking the rawness of an emotion and saying it plain, not letting the language of normal speech obscure the visceral power of feeling. By stating a thing plainly, clearly and openly, then leaving a pause, giving herself space to speak of her experiences, of women’s experiences, she creates a lot of impact. She likewise creates that impact/pause sensation in her structuring – she leads with “the hurting”, then follows with “the loving”, a more positive chapter in the wake of the brutal start, before repeating that again in her last two chapters, “the breaking” and “the healing”. Nothing is rushed – the poems are often short, giving you the space you need to feel what she’s giving you around them, before moving on to the next, rather than piling emotion upon emotion and swamping the listener.

None of this is to say there’s no art in her writing. Simple doesn’t have to mean bad or wrong or without skill. But it’s a very specific line she seems to be taking, and she’s leaning into it quite hard. For me, it works. The content and themes are sufficiently impactful, and the way she’s chosen to put them sufficiently deft that it’s a really good decision. But I think it only works for something that has this level of impact – I’m not sure you could create quite the same atmosphere if you used it for something more light-hearted.

I ended up giving it four stars over all. I liked it, I felt it, and I will definitely listen to more of her – she absolutely has the knack of putting feelings out there for you to feel and experience. But it was missing a tiny spark of something, the something that made me love, for example, Brand New Ancients or The Half God of Rainfall.

*Except it turns out a lot of the poetry that looks cool and interesting isn’t on audible. Monstrous.

**I don’t only want British ones though. I was listening to my Children of Blood and Bone around the same time as this one, and the speaker’s accent there was totally fine and not British (and actually a really important and well done part of how the audiobook was presented). Brains are weird.

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