Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman
I spend a lot of my time at work thinking about the UK’s political system (and to be honest way too much of my free time as well) so I was excited to get a slightly more outside perspective on the workings of Westminster. While the book is probably a little bit basic for hardcore politics nerds (though I was thrilled to see a whole section dedicated to the wonderful world of secondary legislation!), it’s a perfect entry point to the UK’s political culture for those who have wisely spent their time avoiding the BBC homepage. Taking the reader on a journey through the shadowy world of MP selections, elections themselves and then the actual process of lawmaking, Hardman is thorough while still remaining readable and accessible. For anyone who’s looking to get their head around what the hell is going on in Westminster in the run up to this year’s election, this is a great place to start.
Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire
Even by the standards of the Wayward Children series, Lost in the Moment and Found emotionally ruined me. Our heroine is Antsy, a young girl who has fallen through the cracks. After her father’s sudden and tragic death, her mother quickly remarries a man who seems more interested in exploiting rather than helping the vulnerable child whose family he has muscled his way into. After a disturbing encounter with her stepfather, Antsy knows she has to get out fast or something terrible will happen to her. She packs up her backpack and runs away from home, only to stumble into the Shop Where Lost Things Go, a magical pocket dimension that exists between universes and seems to attract the lost and the forgotten. Surrounded by treasures and magical doors that open into an infinite number of new worlds, Antsy is quickly able to banish thoughts of her family to the back of her mind and lose herself in her new adventures. However, all magic comes with a price and, once again, the adults in the room are not looking out for Antsy’s best interests. This is a heartbreaking, albeit hopeful, novella about the loss of childhood innocence, the cycle of abuse and what it takes to break free from it all wrapped up in a magical package. Seanan McGuire has definitely done it again.
Once, Twice, Three Times an Aisling by Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen
Sometimes after reading something heavy, you just need to throw yourself back into a familiar world that you know will make you smile. For me, the Oh My God, What A Complete Aisling series always delivers on the feel good vibes. Aisling represents a very specific type of Irish woman, the girl who has moved to Dublin for work but who travels ‘back home’ to the countryside every weekend to check in on her parents and to see her long-term boyfriend who plays on the local GAA team. The sensible friend who would look on in horror at anything that could be considered ‘notions’. Aisling’s come a long way since the start of the first book and although now she’s a successful business owner, swimming in friends and having her very first casual relationship, she still feels completely overwhelmed. As she turns thirty, she’s grappling with not feeling quite enough and is overcompensating by saying yes to absolutely everything, from giving her best friend the hen party of the century, to catering a celebrity wedding and even *gasp* moving in with a man. Hilarity ensues but also some genuinely sensitive handling of mental health issues and burn out. A perfect light read for heavy times.
Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
Crossroads is a stunning family saga very much of the ‘white people with no real problems creating problems for themselves’ genre of prestigious literature. You have patriarch Russ, a pastor who’s bummed that the kids at church don’t think he’s cool and copes with his midlife crisis by pursuing an affair with a parishioner, and his wife, Marion, who has lied to everyone in her life about her traumatic past and mental health issues and is on the brink of falling apart. Their children, Clem, Becky, Perry and Judson, are respectively trying to get themselves drafted into Vietnam following a sexual awakening, accidentally having a religious awakening while trying to steal another girl’s boyfriend, selling drugs to children while also becoming profoundly addicted himself and too young to be relevant to the plot. The novel is a pretty intense psychological study of each of the characters and is bursting with religious guilt, shame and questions of morality. Pick up this one for beautifully written musings about what it means to be a good person, not for a rip-roaring plot. Franzen has said that this will be the start of a trilogy and I’m fascinated to see where he takes it next.
Toxic: Women, Fame and the Tabloid 2000s by Sarah Ditum
The 2000s were not all that long ago, but reading the book is felt like reading about another planet. A world of upskirting paparazzi, vicious tabloid gossip blogs and stolen celebrity sex tapes, it represents a period where the internet truly was the Wild West and the boundaries between the world online and the real world were still being figured out. This was a fraught time to be dealing with fame and doubly so if you were female. Ditum examines the misogyny of this time period through the lens of the treatment of some of the era’s most famous women, including Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan and Amy Winehouse. This was a fascinating insight into 2000s tabloids culture (which blessedly I was a bit young and sheltered to be too into at the time) but also a tragic tale of complex, talented and interesting young women who were victims of a cannibalistic media model that profited off their pain and revelled in their downfall. An engaging, easy read that will really make you think about the culture that millennial women came of age in.
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
I am slightly embarrassed that it has taken me this long to crack into this queer classic but I am thrilled to say that it absolutely lived up to the hype. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is the story of Jeanette, a young women adopted and raised by her extremely zealous mother to be one of god’s chosen children and a missionary. Jeanette is a true believer and is passionate about her faith but it all goes slightly awry the day she falls for one of the young women that she has converted. Unable to repress who she truly is, Jeanette is forced to leave her family and her church in order to pursue love and fulfilment. Winterson’s prose is so original, vivid and funny while still packing an emotional punch. I can see why this has been such a beloved book for so long and I’m delighted I’ve finally gotten to experience it.
Divine Might by Natalie Haynes
There are few things I will run out and buy faster than a new Natalie Haynes book. Her passion for the ancient world is evident in every word she writes and her keen wit and sharp eye for the intersection of the world of myth with our world really brings the stories to life for a new audience. Her latest book is a non-fiction collection of essays, with each one centring around a different Greek goddess, from the well-known ones like Aphrodite and Athena to the slightly more niche ones such as Demeter and the Furies. I really enjoyed her fresh perspective on these well-loved goddesses, reading this book felt like having a (to be fair, pretty one-sided) chat with a best friend whose as passionate about Greek mythology as I am. Whether you’re a verified Classics nerd like me or a newcomer to Greek mythology who’s looking to learn more, Haynes’ work is a joy.
Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
What does it say about me that this book is one of my favourite comfort reads? When my brain is short-circuiting, nothing calms it down quite like the relentless, high-octane bloodbath of forty-two high school students trapped on an island and forced to kill each other or be killed. Before you say this rips off The Hunger Games, 1) Battle Royale was published nearly ten years earlier, you philistine and 2) it’s even more fucked up because in The Hunger Games most of the tributes were strangers to each other, whereas in Battle Royale the competitors are all members of the same high school class and have years of history, friendship, crushes and grudges between them. The potential for tragedy and betrayal is endless. Our story centres of Shuya Nanahara, a young musician determined to honour the death of his best friend by protecting Noriko, the girl his friend had a huge crush on, but the novel is bursting at the seams with the individual stories of each of the forty-two students. Whether they appear for just one chapter before being killed off or whether they fight on for longer, the reader is given a glimpse into who this person really is as they are pushed to the very edge of their sanity and morality. The key question at the heart of this book is about what it means to trust someone and the horrifying consequences of either trusting the wrong person or, often worse, not trusting the right person. When the stakes are this high, a single moment of weakness can be the difference between life and death and while this book is a pulpy, campy clusterfuck in the best way possible, I also believe in my heart that is has something real to say about humanity, the best and the worst of it.
Screaming. Crying. Throwing Up. This is what The Poppy War did to me and I don’t know when I will be normal again. The story centres around Rin, a young war orphan living in the an isolated backwater of the Nikara Empire. Her foster family see her as being good for nothing more than being married off to a wealthy man old enough to be her grandfather. Rather than resign herself to a loveless life of drudgery, she resolves to pass the Keju – the famously difficult Empire-wide exam to identify the best and brightest to be trained at the Academies. Not only does she pass, she aces it, gaining acceptance into Sinegard, the most elite military academy in Nikan, where the Empire’s future top generals and strategists are made. But Rin’s troubles are only beginning. A poor, dark-skinned girl with no family connections and none of the advantages of her classmates is not exactly welcomed with open arms by the Academy and she has to force herself to be twice as good to get the same respect as her peers. When she unlocks an unprecedented, divine power within herself, she quickly becomes impossible to ignore and with war bearing down on the Empire from the Federation of Mugen, she and her classmates will very quickly have to put their lessons to the test. As they leave the classroom and face real combat for the first time, it becomes apparent that the reality of war is very very different from the theory and that there is nothing that their enemies won’t do to see them eradicated. Sacrifice will be necessary to defeat them, but how much is Rin willing to sacrifice for the power to save her people? And how much of herself will she lose to the Phoenix inside of her who is hungry for destruction? Rin is truly one of my favourite fictional characters and I was rooting for her and her success so hard throughout the book, I really had to catch myself to stop myself from cheering on straight up war crimes. But I support women’s wrongs as well as women’s rights so for me this book is an absolute triumph.
The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang
This series was completely unputdownable so naturally I ran straight for The Dragon Republic after I finished The Poppy War. After defeating the Mugenese, Rin is addicted to opium and crippled by guilt and PTSD. She needs allies but they’re pretty thin on the ground apart from an old frenemy from her days at Sinegard. Nezha, never really one to judge someone for their more ruthless instincts, recruits her to the cause of the Dragon Warlord, who is aiming to take advantage of the chaos of the aftermath of the war and unseat the Empress and create a new Republic. United by their mutual hatred of the Empress, Rin throws herself into this new cause and works to get the power of the Phoenix under control. But as doubts begin to creep in about the purity of the Dragon Warlord’s democratic intentions, coupled with his worryingly one-sided alliance with the Hesperians of the West, Rin slowly begins to suspect that Nikan’s future lies elsewhere. Another grim and epic tale of gods, monsters and a bloody and gruelling war with an absolutely heart-stopping and soul-shattering ending (WHY?). Once again R.F. Kuang has ruined my life.
I almost never read an entire series in back to back (last time it happened was with the Grishaverse and I’m still not capable of being normal about that one) but I’m pretty sure the pages of this book were made of crack because I literally couldn’t stop myself. Rin, my favourite war criminal who needs therapy so so much, has gone what could only be described as fully feral after Nezha’s betrayal and she is out for vengeance at any cost. Disillusioned by the Empress and the Dragon Warlord, Rin realises that it’s time for her to reconnect with her Southern roots and lead an uprising of ordinary Nikarans that will shake the aristocracy to its core. With an army who revere her as a goddess at her side, she is ready to finally be the master of her own destiny and finally give the people of Nikara the freedom to be their own masters by banishing the colonizing Hesperians from their shores for good. But what will be the price of total victory and is it one that her pride and bloodlust will let her pay? A profoundly satisfying if devastating conclusion to as close to a perfect trilogy as I have ever read. Truly I have not been this fucked up by a series in a long time. I’m still thinking about it weeks later and cannot stop recommending it. I literally do not know when/if I will ever be over this.
The Drowning Faith by R.F. Kuang
Is it unhinged to do a whole review for a fifteen-page novella? Maybe. But it’s even more unhinged for R.F. Kuang to have written a line like “She’s the only divine thing he’s ever believed in. The only creature in this vast, cruel land who could kill him. And sometimes, in his loveliest dreams, he imagines she does.” and not even include it in the main series so I think I’m behaving very reasonably given the circumstances. When I started The Poppy War, I hated Nezha’s guts. He was an arrogant, rich boy with no real problems who was needlessly making my girl Rin’s life harder than it needed to be and it was already really hard. But then, somewhere along the way, in between fighting back to back with Rin at the siege of Sinegard and major backstory reveals which give some context as to why he was aways acting like such an asshole, he won me over. After finishing Chapter 5 of The Burning God, going back and reading these scenes from throughout the series from his perspective was so painful but the hurt was so good. Seeing how far all of the characters have come since those first years in Sinegard really drove home how war and atrocities have warped them all almost beyond recognition and the contrast and complexity in his and Rin’s feelings about their relationship is just a punch to the gut. R.F. Kuang, you cruel genius, you will be receiving my therapy bill in the post.
The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett
After a few weeks of living in the grim, militaristic nightmare of The Poppy War trilogy, I needed something lighter ASAP and what could possibly fit the bill better than The Light Fantastic. It picks up right where The Colour of Magic leaves off with the Great A’tuin, the turtle on which the Discworld rests, swimming through space towards a mysterious red star. Consensus seems to be that this means the world is ending and the only one who has the ability to stop it is Rincewind, a cowardly and inept wizard who happens to have one of the eight most powerful spells in the world lodged in his brain. As he stumbles through druids, gingerbread houses, cults, one very organised wizard and Death himself along with his persistant companions, Twoflower and his loyal Luggage, Rincewind comes to the concerning conclusion that he may be a hero after all. While this wasn’t my favourite of the Discworld series books I’ve read thus far, it’s still crackling with all the warmth, wit and humour that Pratchett is so well known for.
Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch
I was waiting for Rivers of London to finally tackle the most obviously magical and haunted part of London – the tube – and it did not disappoint. London’s foremost magical detective is back, this time wandering the tunnels of the London Underground to investigate a magical murder that seems to revolve around…pottery? Yep, definitely falling firmly into the category of ‘weird shit’ the wizards of the Folly look into as the magical wing of the Metropolitan police. This is great addition to this series of fantasy crime novels, that sees Peter coping with fairies, river spirits and worst of all, Americans. Aaronovitch’s signature dry sense of humour and vivid imagination are all over this book and I cannot recommend this series enough for those who like their fantasy with a side of urban edginess.
Kindled Spirits 