The Other Black Girl is an interesting one — I don’t think this wholly succeeds either as a piece of literary fiction or genre fiction, but I still haThe Other Black Girl is an interesting one — I don’t think this wholly succeeds either as a piece of literary fiction or genre fiction, but I still had a lot of fun reading it. Set at a fictional competitive publishing house in New York, Wagner, whose toxic work environment is captured with aplomb, it follows Nella, an editorial assistant and the only Black employee who is thrilled when a new Black girl is hired in a role similar to her own. But shortly after, Nella starts receiving cryptic messages begging her to leave Wagner, and she doesn’t know who she can trust.
Where this fails as a thriller, it succeeds as literary fiction: the pace is practically glacial, but not for nothing; Zakiya Dalila Harris uses that time to wholly develop her characters and depict the toxic insularity of workplace microaggressions. There’s a lot of sharp, biting commentary in here about what it means to be Black in a white office, and what it takes to get ahead in the publishing industry; it’s an incisive read in that regard and I would happily have read an entire novel devoted solely to this element. But then the day-to-day office drudgery starts to fade into the background when the mystery element comes to the forefront.
Where this fails as literary fiction, it succeeds as a thriller: the writing itself is engaging but otherwise nothing special, there’s a weird, quasi-speculative twist that comes out of nowhere, there are random POV chapters interspersed from other women embroiled in the bigger picture thing that’s going on that don’t further the story in any way, but which I assume are there to add tension and intrigue. But the tension and intrigue are never fully there because the pacing is so uneven.
You could certainly laud this book, as many have, for being a sort of ‘genre-defying’ creation, but for me, this was just an overly ambitious project, especially for a debut. Its refusal to fit staunchly into a ‘literary’ or ‘genre’ box isn’t the issue; it’s that we end up with a book that’s half scathing social commentary of racism in corporate America, half a Get Out-style thriller, and it didn’t fully execute either of those aims as well as it could have. That said, even though this never came together in the way I was hoping for, I certainly did enjoy reading it — it’s unexpected, it’s original, it’s sharp, it’s funny — and I think Zakiya Dalila Harris is an author to watch out for....more
I didn't hate this book at all but it was just so, so unremarkable. I loved the premise: Jeanie and Julius are 51-year-old twins living with their motI didn't hate this book at all but it was just so, so unremarkable. I loved the premise: Jeanie and Julius are 51-year-old twins living with their mother in rural England who drops dead one day and suddenly Jeanie and Julius are forced to navigate a world they don't fully understand. It's different and interesting but it just really fell flat for me.
The problem with Unsettled Ground is that there's just no momentum. And I don't mean that in the sense that it would have worked better as a page-turner murder mystery or anything like that; I'm an advocate of the literary-thriller hybrid genre and I think Fuller nails that tone here--there is a bit of a central mystery but it's mostly a vehicle to explore the themes that she's interested in interrogating. That's all fine and well. But on a sentence-by-sentence level, this book dragged. There's no sense that it's moving forward toward anything, it just feels like it's spinning its wheels and I did not at any point find myself compelled to pick it up.
Like I said, I did enjoy some of the thematic threads that Fuller explored in this novel and I don't have an overwhelmingly negative feeling toward it; I just couldn't bring myself to get invested at any point and I think this would be an incredibly lackluster addition to the Women's Prize shortlist.
Thank you to Netgalley and Tin House for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
I started out loving this but it did eventually start to fall in my estimation. I adored McLaughlin’s writing: it's clear-eyed and pacy and this is, oI started out loving this but it did eventually start to fall in my estimation. I adored McLaughlin’s writing: it's clear-eyed and pacy and this is, on the whole, a fairly enjoyable read. I'm also a sucker for anything having to do with art or art history or museums, so I loved the plot thread involving a woman turning up out of nowhere and claiming to have been responsible for a sculpture supposed to have been created by the late, famous artist Robert Locke.
Where I felt this novel fell short of its potential was in its domestic storyline: it follows art historian Nessa's failing marriage (her husband has recently cheated on her and they're trying to get past it for the sake of their teenage daughter), and it also introduces a figure from Nessa's past who holds a secret about her. For one thing, the two threads (Nessa's work at the museum and her home life) don't dovetail in a way that I find satisfying or realistic (Luke's hyperfixation on the statue was something I found almost absurd in how it was so transparently shoehorned in there). And for another thing, the secret about Nessa's past revealed something that shone rather a different light on her husband's cheating, which I felt could have added so much depth and complexity to that dynamic but which instead ended up feeling rather underexplored.
On the whole this wasn't bad but I also don't think it quite showcases what Danielle McLaughlin is capable of.
Thank you to Netgalley for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
Pitched as Gone Girl meets Room, Mirrorland tells the story of identical twin sisters Cat and El, who survive a bizarre, insular childhood in EdinburgPitched as Gone Girl meets Room, Mirrorland tells the story of identical twin sisters Cat and El, who survive a bizarre, insular childhood in Edinburgh by inventing Mirrorland, an imaginary, Narnia-esque world that lives under the pantry stairs. Years have gone by and now we follow Cat, who’s estranged from her sister and living in Los Angeles, until she gets a call from El’s husband, Ross, begging her to return to Edinburgh as El has gone missing, which involves returning to the house they grew up in, as Ross and El are now living there.
That this is the author’s debut novel is very apparent; most of the problems are with its poor pacing and its inexpert synthesis of the mystery and childhood trauma narratives. Flashback passages are shoehorned into the present-day narrative with an abruptness that almost feels deliberate, almost feels like a commentary on trauma, but which mostly ends up feeling poorly written. These flashbacks were so detailed and so repetitive that I mostly found myself skimming them as they failed to advance the characterization or the present-day narrative in any way; they did, ultimately, contain clues that tied into the mystery, but I ended up guessing most of the twists anyway, even without giving large segments of this book my full attention.
I’m struggling a bit to rate this one as I weirdly did enjoy reading parts of it — once it really got its momentum up, around 50-60% in, I couldn’t put it down — but the negatives far outweigh the positives of this reading experience. I’d skip it unless there’s something unique about this premise that appeals to you.
Thank you to Scribner and Netgalley for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
I admired but didn’t particularly like this book. I’ve talked before about how I don’t really get on with books about motherhood, and sometimes the reI admired but didn’t particularly like this book. I’ve talked before about how I don’t really get on with books about motherhood, and sometimes the reverse is true too, I don’t always love books about daughterhood, especially when it’s the book’s main focus. (Something like Transcendent Kingdom is the exception, where the mother/daughter relationship is one thread among many.)
I was finding something salvageable in the first half of Burnt Sugar, but the second half just lost me. While I tend to enjoy 'unlikable' protagonists, Antara was often too much for me--I found her to be deliberately belligerent toward the reader in a way that I didn't think was particularly interesting or well-executed. I think this book does have a lot going for it in terms of its chilly depiction of a strained mother/daughter relationship, but Antara herself staunchly refused to do any of the heavy lifting to earn my investment. I just didn't find her believable or her actions comprehensible; this book is written in the first person and still I struggled to discern some of Antara's motivations (this isn't helped by the book's awkward structure, flitting between the past and the present in a way that was occasionally challenging to follow and which I didn't think ultimately did it any favors).
Avni Doshi's prose also failed to impress me, but, like most of my criticisms here, I feel that might just be a matter of personal taste. I do see why this book has been so critically well-received, it just really wasn't for me.
Thank you to Netgalley and Abrams for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
In the style of a somewhat modernized film noir, Survive the Night tells the story of Charlie, a New Jersey college student looking for a ride home toIn the style of a somewhat modernized film noir, Survive the Night tells the story of Charlie, a New Jersey college student looking for a ride home to Ohio on a cold winter’s night. At the college’s ride board (this is set in the 1990s, pre-the sort of technology that we’d use today for this kind of arrangement), she meets Josh Baxter, also heading in that direction, so she gratefully accepts the ride. The only snag: Charlie’s roommate and best friend was recently murdered by a serial killer. The longer Charlie and Josh spend in the car and the more they get chatting, the more Charlie starts realizing that certain details in Josh’s story aren’t adding up, and she starts to wonder if she’s trapped in the car of her roommate’s murderer.
I read this in a single sitting — I think it’s Sager’s most successful page-turner to date, which seems almost counterintuitive; you’d think that a girl being trapped in a car wouldn’t exactly make for the most gripping of reads, but this might be his most tense, terrifying work yet. The set-up may sound simple, but the way this story unfolds could not be more unpredictable if it tried.
This book DOES however include the cringiest line I’ve ever read in the history of my entire existence, so I cannot in good conscience recommend it without warning you that this is a series of sentences you are going to have to read with your very own eyeballs — apologies for subjecting you to this:
She’s no longer the scared, self-loathing girl she was when she left campus. She’s something else.
A fucking femme fatale.
File this under: more reasons I try to avoid thrillers by men.
Anyway, after my eyes were done rolling into the back of my skull, I pushed onward and yeah, what can I say, I had a lot of fun reading this. Certain elements of the resolution were brilliant, others were a bit silly, but all I can really ask of a thriller is to keep me guessing and keep me on my toes, and Sager always delivers on that front. I’ve become less confident through the years about his ability to write women — see above quote (I thought his female protagonist in his debut, Final Girls, was written brilliantly, which lured me into a false sense of security) — so the more of his books I read, the more the shine does slightly wear off, but I doubt I’ll be able to quit him any time soon; his books are too damn addicting....more
"To be you is to apologize and often that apology comes in the form of suppression. That suppression is indiscriminate. That suppression knows not
"To be you is to apologize and often that apology comes in the form of suppression. That suppression is indiscriminate. That suppression knows not when it will spill. What you're trying to say is that it's easier for you to hide in your own darkness, than energy cloaked in your own vulnerability. Not better, but easier. However, the longer you hold it in, the more likely you are to suffocate. At some point, you must breathe."
Caleb Azumah Nelson's debut, a slim volume just under 150 pages, blew me away. I'm inherently skeptical of second-person narration; I find it particularly tricky to do effectively and with real purpose, so when I started reading it was with a slight apprehension, but Azumah Nelson won my trust effortlessly. His writing is absorbing and gorgeous, the bond between character and reader sealed by the author's choice to frame reader as protagonist, a choice that has the potential to fall flat but which instead is elevated by Azumah Nelson's sharp commentary on sight and observation.
This probably sounds like an off the wall comparison but Open Water is a bit like James Baldwin meets Sally Rooney. It has that tender, push-and-pull, will-they-won't-they quality of Normal People but it's also heavier; the stakes are higher; it's not a book generically about young love but instead specifically about young Black love, and the cost of systemic racism on Black love and Black bodies. It's a gentle, supple story, joyous and heart-rending and intimate.
26-year-old Caleb Azumah Nelson is an author to watch. Calling it now, whatever he writes next will be shortlisted for the Booker.
Thank you to Netgalley and to Viking for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
I read Taylor's short story Anne of Cleves ages ago (which appears in this collection), and I quickly fell in love. In some ways it's a melancholic, hI read Taylor's short story Anne of Cleves ages ago (which appears in this collection), and I quickly fell in love. In some ways it's a melancholic, heavy story, but there's also a playfulness to it, and I found that tone so refreshing that I was sure that Filthy Animals was going to end up as one of my favorite books of the year.
Instead, this book is unendingly bleak. Anne of Cleves offers a brief respite from the misery, but it's otherwise a weightier collection than I had expected. Every alternating story in this collection follows the same narrative: a depressed Black man named Lionel has just met a white couple at a party, Charles and Sophie, who are in an open relationship; he hooks up with Charles and then gets drawn into their lives. I loved the choice to anchor the collection to a single narrative, and without fail these stories were my favorites and the ones where Taylor most succeeded at accessing the characters' complex emotional landscapes.
The other stories left less of an impression on me, and I think it's because we just don't spend enough time with the characters to fully earn the emotional impact that Taylor is aiming for, and that he nails so well with Wallace's story in Real Life. I finished this a week ago and Lionel's story is really the only one that has stuck in my mind since then.
I still really enjoyed reading this--a discussed, I love Taylor's writing--and I would wholeheartedly recommend it. It's a skillful exploration of the intersection of loneliness, trauma, and intimacy--it just wasn't entirely what I needed it to be. But that is a-okay! Will still devour whatever Taylor publishes next....more
I read this because it’s allegedly a retelling of King Lear. It... isn’t really (and I’ll talk about that more when I one day inevitably do a blog posI read this because it’s allegedly a retelling of King Lear. It... isn’t really (and I’ll talk about that more when I one day inevitably do a blog post on retellings of King Lear) but I actually liked this a LOT more than I was expecting to. Usually when I read YA my overriding feeling is ‘this wasn’t written for me,’ but I actually didn’t feel that so much; this largely felt like an adult thriller when I was reading. Yes, it contains Teenagers Experiencing Emotions, but that isn't something I have an issue with; there was this sort of cool detachment to the writing that I felt worked in its favor and it was a fantastically paced, cleverly structured book that wasn't weighed down by the protagonist's navel gazing. And yes, there’s The Twist—it didn’t blow my socks off because it ended up being something I’ve seen done in other books, but I actually thought the execution here was really fantastic and it was definitely worth the wait. I did feel like the whole thing came together successfully, and it's hard to talk about without giving anything away, but suffice to say this book was just delightful escapism if you prefer your beach reads to have a sharp edge. ...more
[just a note that I did not actually read the Folger edition, I'm just adding it to Goodreads for simplicity's sake as a representative for all of Sha[just a note that I did not actually read the Folger edition, I'm just adding it to Goodreads for simplicity's sake as a representative for all of Shakespeare's works that are not his plays. I'm not positive which poems are actually included in this edition!]
Anyway, some of these poems were lovely but on the whole just not my cup of tea. Venus and Adonis was definitely the highlight for me....more
A Thousand Acres is King Lear meets twentieth-century midwestern farming; oddly enough, a thematic match made in heaven, the mores of the small Iowan A Thousand Acres is King Lear meets twentieth-century midwestern farming; oddly enough, a thematic match made in heaven, the mores of the small Iowan community so richly detailed that the stakes effortlessly mirror medieval English court life. It's told through the eyes of Ginny, the eldest daughter and Goneril figure, who lives on their father's thousand acre farm with her husband in a house adjacent to her sister Rose's (Regan)--the youngest sister, Caroline (Cordelia) has moved away and works as a lawyer. When their aging father announces his retirement and intention to turn the farm over to his three daughters, Caroline admits skepticism and is turned away; Ginny and Rose are then left to battle his cruelty and deterioration into drunkenness while keeping the farm afloat.
While the premise sounds literally transposed from the Shakespeare play, enough details are reinvented to assure the reader that literality is not Smiley's intention. Rose has cancer, and she has two daughters; Ginny has had five miscarriages and desperately wants a child; Loren (Edgar), in my opinion one of the smartest characters in the original play, is here an afterthought and a bit of a sycophantic idiot; Pete (Cornwall) is a recovering abusive husband, his relationship with Rose unhappy and volatile, while Ginny's marriage to Ty (Albany) is placid in comparison; the Fool is omitted; Jess (Edmund) is not a scheming mastermind, but instead an unmoored drifter whose interruption of Ginny's life is unplanned, haphazard.
And as someone who's read King Lear about a million times and has spent countless hours thinking about these characters, if I am actively choosing to spend my time reading King Lear retellings, I can't allow myself to get mired in the details, or else reading retellings just becomes a self-defeating exercise. Half of what I just wrote, what Smiley decided to do with these characters, I don't agree with; it doesn't fit my own idea of what a picture-perfect retelling should look like. So I'm much less interested in the details and more interested in the author's vision, in the ways in which they interact with the original play even--especially--when they choose to deviate. This is where The Queens of Innis Lear, a high fantasy Lear retelling, fell spectacularly short for me, and this is where Smiley succeeded.
Each of Smiley's characters is tremendously well-drawn, none more-so than the narrator Ginny. Ginny is obedient and self-effacing, the modest counterpart to her sister Rose who blows through the story like a hurricane. The dynamic between these two sisters, united against the obdurate front that is their father, yet more severed than either of them realizes, is what makes this book so memorable and horribly devastating. This is a bleak, stark, humorless work, which accesses the tragic inevitability of the original play and refocuses it. This isn't the tragedy of Lear as much as it is the tragedy of Goneril, the long-suffering eldest daughter, and in turning this into Ginny's story, part of the cosmic scale is lost, but the calamity and the creeping dread is recaptured on a smaller, more intimate scale. This is an engrossing, quietly devastating book that deftly examines power, corruption, and betrayal through a melancholic, reflective lens, and I found the result both beautiful and heart-rending.
I prefer to write my reviews without spoilers, but in this case, the spoiler is also a huge trigger, so I do want to talk about that before we go. (view spoiler)[Trigger warning for sexual assault of a minor. The reveal that the Lear figure had raped Ginny and Rose when they were teenagers didn't sit well with me at first; for one thing, I tend to take the opinion that books should not introduce sexual assault as a plot point if sexual assault is not their primary focus; for another, it felt to me like a lazy shortcut to giving Ginny and Rose permission to defy their father, an unnecessary addition when the justification for their behavior is already built into the framework of the story. What I did find interesting, though, was how this related to Ginny and Rose's relationship to Caroline; it was refreshing to see a Lear retelling finally do something interesting with Cordelia, turning her from the archetype of the perfect woman to a stubborn, ungrateful child, choosing not to see the full picture of what Ginny and Rose shielded her from. There's a line toward the end where Ginny is about to tell Caroline the full truth, and Caroline turns away and refuses to hear it; there's an acknowledgement that truth can't be delivered without it being asked for, a shocking subversion from Cordelia's role in the original play that I found tremendously effective. (hide spoiler)]...more
Despite having a deliciously enticing premise, Madam fails on just about every level. Set at the fictional Scottish all girMamma mia where do I begin.
Despite having a deliciously enticing premise, Madam fails on just about every level. Set at the fictional Scottish all girls’ boarding school Caldonbrae Hall, Madam introduces Rose, a bright young ingenue of a teacher who gets a job as the head of Caldonbrae’s Classics department — notably and oddly, she’s the school’s first outside hire in over a decade. She arrives at Caldonbrae and quickly discerns that there is fuckery afoot.
The entire function of Rose’s character is to unearth the fuckery. There is so little interiority to her character that there is never a sense that she is a real person living this experience; she is transparently a thriller protagonist bumbling around chasing clues, and she does an agonizingly terrible job at it. Every time a character starts to reveal something and then realizes they’ve said too much, Rose lets it go — quite the impressive regard for boundaries, given the fact that when she isn’t walking away from people mid-conversation, she’s asking everyone and their mother impertinent questions that go nowhere. This is, quite literally, the entire book. The fuckery is, of course, eventually unearthed, and yes, it was indeed the most obvious explanation that you guessed by page 50, but anyway, what happens at this point in the book? Rose actually takes the fate of her students into her own hands? She allies with someone to bring about systemic change? She realizes resistance is futile and makes a plan to get the hell out of Dodge? No, she basically just… asks more questions. More specific questions, this time around, to be fair to her.
Anyway, I mentioned briefly that Rose is a Classics teacher, so let’s go back to that. Having been raised by a second-wave feminist, Rose has internalized a lot of her mother’s values (she wouldn’t go as far as to call herself a feminist though, heaven forfend! Sidebar: I’m not sure that in 2021 we still need novels that spoon-feed feminist ideology to the reader by adding a spoonful of sugar to the medicine, holding our hand and reassuring us that “women are people too” isn’t a radical, scary notion, but… Phoebe Wynne disagrees, I guess). Anyway, Rose is drawn to female characters and historical figures from Greek and Roman mythology and history, and spotlights a handful of them — Antigone, Dido, Medea, Lucretia, et al. — in her classes. The integration of classics into this novel is so ham-fisted, so unsubtle, so unnecessary, it bears asking why it had to be the classics at all. The Secret History (a very different project with very different aims that I am not attempting to compare to Madam on a deeper level, to be clear) would not be The Secret History if it were about a group of chemical engineering students — the classics are so integral to that novel’s themes and framework that it would crumble without that element. If We Were Villains would not be If We Were Villains if the students were studying Jane Austen instead of Shakespeare. This isn’t a criticism; it shows how deliberately constructed those novels are. In Madam, the classics are merely an arbitrary addition that could have been substituted with impactful women from any period of literature or history and netted the exact same result: a half-baked commentary on how History Has Not Been Kind To Women.
Aside from being thematically careless, this book was just poorly written on a sentence-by-sentence level. Inexplicably, most scenes are recounted in the pluperfect tense:
“Earlier that morning she’d knotted her unruly hair into a thick plait[…]”
“Rose had gazed at the delightful picture they all made, touching her own blazer with a tinge of shame.”
“She’d stopped by Anthony’s office on Friday to see if he wanted to go for a walk together over the weekend.”
Why? Why are we being narrated scenes that already happened rather than just… being shown those scenes? The whole thing takes on a very tell-don’t-show style, which I believe can work in certain circumstances, but this ain’t it. Also, the details in this book are all in the wrong places. It’s set at a boarding school, and the school itself is barely described — we are usually up to date on the state of Rose’s hair, though. I also think it should be a cardinal sin for a book to start with a journey (in this case: Rose on the train to Caldonbrae), end the chapter when they arrive, and start the following chapter the next morning. We don’t see Rose settling into her flat, we don’t see her walking around the school, we don’t see any of it. The exposition is just terrible. Characters are also introduced at such a lightning speed that I couldn’t keep track of who anyone was and I had no sense of how many students or teachers were at this school.
Changing gears now: as other reviewers have noted, the white saviorism and the tokenistic portrayal of a group of Japanese students is downright shameful. Diversity does not need to serve a narrative function, and indeed, it’s often better when it does not, especially in the hands of a white author writing about non-white characters. Here, the function is both extant and obvious: it’s to illustrate by comparison how progressive Rose is. And I quote:
“The general spread of white faces made Rose uncomfortable despite the small handful of Asian girls, who seemed to group together. This lack of diversity leaked across the staff, too — not at all appropriate or modern for the nineties, she thought.”
Speaking of diversity and representation, I’m not sure why some people are calling this book queer? It’s not. There is one (1) lesbian character, not the protagonist, and she’s a self-loathing alcoholic, so… not sure why that’s something to celebrate, but whatever.
Anyway, back to the above quote, gross depiction of Japanese students aside — this book is set in the 1990s. That sweet spot for dark academia novels, where authors have the convenience of writing virtually about the present-day, but where the characters don’t have cell phones and laptops which would destroy both the atmosphere and undermine the characters’ work at solving the mystery. That’s all fine and well, but if you take out all the references to Queen and Batman Begins, this book feels like something out of the 1800s. You will hear no disputes from me about the fact that misogyny is alive and well and that certain individuals and institutions hold antiquated values, but those conservative values are satirized to such an extreme here that they start to feel utterly absurd. And the problem is that this book is not trying to be satire. I’m supposed to take it at face value, even when it’s pushing my suspension of disbelief further and further past its breaking point.
Which brings us to The Fuckery. As discussed, I found it very obvious, but that is honestly the least of my damn concerns. The details here were just… so, so ridiculous, trying so hard to be provocative. The “Worship” scene (if you know you know) is the most unintentionally funny thing I have read in my entire life. This was supposed to be a horrifying scene and I just couldn’t stop laughing at the fact that someone actually greenlit this garbage. I could practically see Phoebe Wynne rubbing her hands together in glee for having shocked the reader with something so DARING and TABOO when it actually just served to undermine the impact of whatever psychological abuse was going on here by turning the whole thing into a dark, fucked up cartoonish pantomime.
This was just an incoherent, poorly-constructed project that had no ardor, no artistic integrity, and no intrigue. It was bizarrely terrible and did not have a single redeeming quality and it made me feel cynical about my profession (I’m an editor) and if you take anything from this review let it be this: read literally any other book! Please! I don’t care how good the summary is! I suffered so you don’t have to!!!
Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
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