Nella Larsen has been a new discovery for me this year and I’m so glad I’ve finally found her. Passing is the story of two childhood friends whose lives take very different paths. Irene and Clare are both light-skinned black women living in America in the 1920s. But while Irene has married a black man and has a rich and fulfilling life ensconced in Harlem’s thriving black community, Clare has chosen to pass as white. Married to a white man and cut off from her past, always living in fear of having her secret discovered, Clare is living a half-life. When she and Irene reconnect after a chance encounter, Clare increasingly inserts herself into Irene’s comfortable life. Irene is simultaneously appalled and fascinated by the dangerous line that Clare is walking and when their lives become entirely too intertwined for comfort, she is unable to bring herself to stop the violent explosion that breaks the tension. This is a little book that deals with big questions about what it means to live authentically and the steep price that we are willing to pay for happiness.
A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon
A Day of Fallen Night is a prequel to the excellent Priory of the Orange Tree and the second instalment in Shannon’s Roots of Chaos series. The story is set in a world haunted by the memory of the Nameless One, a great and terrible dragon who, centuries ago, decimated the population and set nations alight. Princess Glorian Berethnet of Inys is part of a royal line whose continued survival is believed to be the chain keeping the Nameless One at bay. The reality is a bit more complicated than that. Tunuva Melim knows that one day the Nameless One will return and she and her sisters at the Priory of the Orange Tree hone their magic and skill with weapons to ensure they are ready to slay him when he does. Meanwhile a young priestess named Dumai knows that not all dragons are to be feared. She has spent her life waiting for the benevolent dragons of the East to awaken from their long slumber and bring water back to her people. The lives of these three women are thrown into disarray when fire-breathing dragons begin to re-emerge – not quite the dreaded Nameless One but certainly enough to bring their homelands to their knees. Although they do not know it, something much more powerful than they can comprehend links them and each has a role to play in saving the world as they know it. Shannon is a master of world building. Each of the nations and cultures depicted in these books feels rich and distinctive and she has brought them all vividly to life. I would say however there are points where it feels a touch bloated – I don’t know that every character or episode or excursion was strictly necessary to the overall plot and there were moments I found myself groaning slightly when a character would set off on yet another journey to accomplish something that could have been done in a less roundabout way. But ultimately I do really like this series and will happily spend time in this fabulous world for as long as Shannon continues to write it.
With A Vengeance by Riley Sager
Thank you to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for this ARC. With A Vengeance is a revenge thriller which centres around the machinations of Anna Matheson. Twelve years after her family was destroyed by an extremely convoluted conspiracy, Anna has lured the six people responsible onto a non-stop luxury train to Chicago. Over the course of fourteen hours she plans to confront these people and, after allowing them to stew in their own guilt for a bit, hand them over to the FBI. Unfortunately the plan goes awry pretty quickly when Anna’s targets start dying, depriving her of the chance to savour her revenge. My main problem with this book was less the increasingly outlandish twists and turns (not gonna even touch the plot holes) and more the way the author talks down to the reader. My pet hate is when authors spell everything out as if I’m incapable of doing any sort of critical thinking and this book was full of that. Definitely not for me.
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
Pregnant teenage girls who’ve been banished to a home for unwed mothers using witchcraft to get even with the patriarchal structures that are keeping them down? Oh Grady Hendrix, you really do know how to get my attention. This book was everything I’ve come to expect from Hendrix’s work; highly original, unputdownable and absolutely harrowing. The thing that I like most about Hendrix is that he’s so good at making the every day horrors of being a human just as scary as all of the supernatural elements. So many parts of this book were terrifying but but the scariest parts are the mundane body horror of pregnancy and childbirth as well as unthinking cruelty shown to the protagonists by the adults who should have been looking out for them. Because when the supposed ‘good guys’ dehumanise and degrade you, who wouldn’t at least consider making a deal with the devil? If you’ve not already been reading Hendrix’s work, now is a great time to start.
Abroad in Japan: Ten Years in the Land of the Rising Sun by Chris Broad
As a wide-eyed young graduate, Chris Broad applied to a programme that parachutes young English speakers into Japanese schools to help spread the English language. No prior knowledge of Japanese language or culture was required. When he first lands in a in the remote Northern prefecture of Yamagata, he’s barely able to introduce himself to his new colleagues but Abroad in Japan tracks his journey from his early Family Mart chicken-fuelled kanji study sessions to becoming a pillar of the local community. While the book is broadly a fun and light-hearted account of one man’s coming of age and discovery of a new culture, I will say I felt the claim that it spans ‘all forty-seven prefectures’ of Japan was a bit misleading. While Broad does account a trip in which he cycled across all forty-seven prefectures of Japan, he doesn’t actually say anything about the vast majority of places he visited and instead spends time telling the reader about his struggles with editing the Youtube videos he took of the journey. Maybe that’s appealing to some people but I’d much rather here about the interesting places I’m sure he saw. I would say generally towards the end the book feels like it focuses much more on Broad’s career as a Youtuber rather than Japan itself so bear this in mind if you’re looking for more of a travel memoir. Ultimately though I think this was a fun read and is worth picking up if you’re thinking about visiting Japan.
Kindled Spirits 