The Rachel Incident gets five stars from me

This is both a small story of one woman's decade--from seedy university digs and hangovers with her gay roommate through professional development to the birth of her first child--and the story of Ireland's financial and social turmoil of the early 21st century. It tackles abuse of power and academic privilege, the difficulties and exultations of coming out queer in a college town filled with football hooligans and conservative religious parents, couple dynamics viewed through the lenses of several different Rachels in the course of her evolution toward maturity. And especially it speaks of lies, their endurance and their evolution. 

Amid the memorable images of drunken sprees and devastating breakups are some deeply resonant lines, such as

He talked about the book industry as if it were a dragon that was chained in the basement, and would tear us limb from limb at any moment.

I suspect most authors, editors, and booksellers would agree. Even some agents...

 

The book launch scene in chapter 7 is--apart from one notable backroom moment--both entertaining and cringingly familiar to authors and bookstore owners.

At one point Rachel talks about bands whose names she wouldn’t remember a decade later but that occupied "a magical sweet space between celebrity and accessibility.” 

 

For me this book is a magical sweet space between Ireland as it is, Ireland of the bleak financial-crash years before the Celtic Tiger roared anew, and the Ireland that was and remains shaped indelibly by the starvation times under Queen Victoria. Ireland has a long and complex memory, and that is infused in every page of this engaging tale of a young woman growing up, navigating her world not always wisely. Her happy ending isn't one I'd have envisioned, and yet it was perfect for her. I dare you not to tear up.

 

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue

the New York Times best-selling author of All Our Hidden Gifts

#Ireland #abortion #university #comingout #goinghome #financialcrash #womensfiction #Netgalley

DIVA by Daisy Goodwin

A competent fictionalization that breaks no new ground

In Goodwin's competent hands, this fictionalized life of operatic sensation Maria Callas is framed, and punctuated, by her relationship with the richest man on the planet, Ari Onassis. It drops us into her public space and private thoughts on the day she learns Ari has abandoned her and their long-standing affair to marry a woman of better pedigree, namely Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. 

 

After that emotionally tense opening, we skip back-and-forth through her early desperate years in New York City, the ignored younger sister, until she demonstrates her singing talent to her grasping mother. Sent back to Italy when her parents separate, she supports her mother by singing in the streets and bars through some troubled times before finally making her way to a teacher and opera company. When she returns to New York City, it is as a world renowned diva, and the rest of the book is pretty much headlines with some yearning over forbidden food and arrogant comments about her own brilliance.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. But although it gives possible plausible insights into fictionalized Maria, it fails to make her engaging or sympathetic, and does not elevate the rather humdrum elements of her celebrated life either on or off stage. If there was a search for meaning in her life it seems to have gone no further than a quest to be allowed to eat pasta again as opposed to eating only salad to preserve her figure for the stage. With so much rich opera to draw on, there were many parallels that could have been made, some tragedies underpinned by the operas in which she performed, but the book stays in the lighter and easier fare, resulting in an operetta of middling competence rather than an opera-quality life and death.

 

Morgan is My Name - a medieval sorceress with modern resonance

Morgan is My Name 

by Sophie Keetch

 It’s a long time since a book carried me back to that time of courtly love and legend with such insistent grace. It’s a lean book, not a thousand-page epic, and yet in my mind’s cinema, drawing on all the Arthurian books and movies indexed through the decades since my first Disney Arthur, it’s a tale far greater than the economical, episodic text that pins it to the page.

One great truth is stated, plain as day, in the respect of the falcon Jezebel, a peregrine belonging to Morgan’s father. “Every return to the glove is a courtesy, not a right,” said young Morgan, just before her father rode away to try to draw Uther Pendragon from his woman and his children. The hawk is a recurring image and so are candles, signifying respectively freedom and the light of knowledge, both forbidden to young Morgan, princess of Cornwall, from the moment of her father’s death at the hands of Uther Pendragon.

This is a book about a girl growing up like any other girl of her era and high position, with only hints of the power she will come to wield, and the force of her hatred for Uther Pendragon. She is intimately relatable to modern girls, and the sidelights on her mother’s life and choices as the reluctant consort of Uther are relatable for older readers. There’s familiar territory for the Arthurian legends and a worthy courtly romance that makes the heart beat faster, that yearns for knights and dancing and candlelight and stolen kisses and secret vows of love and fidelity. For all the fire that burns in her blood for one parfait knight, this Morgan relies on other women in ways and depths that she, and they, could never rely on men—and indeed still can’t. It’s a story of sisterhood for survival in a time when men held all the outward cards. Again, very relatable for modern women.  The eruption of Uther into the narrative each time Morgan finds a measure of peace is a storm that reshapes her life and sends it hurtling off in a new direction.

And yet, because we readers raised on Arthurian legend know her doom (or think we do) we cannot but feel the foreboding that looms just over the crest of the hill. We want to change her ending. We hope that this author, with her insights into this prickly but relatable girl, can craft for her an ending that is not, this time, a doom for the ages. We hold our breath. As each turning of the page draws us closer to finding out what chaos Uther’s next thunderbolt will unleash - like a burly Zeus on horseback, his armour rusting in the Cornish rains - we both yearn for and fear the day when Morgan truly comes into her power. 

For then her doom will be truly set. 

 #NetGalley #ThanksNetgalley #Arthurian #MorganLeFay #Merlin #witchcraft #healing #chivalry #medieval #romance #CourtlyLove #SophieKeetch #PenguinRandomHouse #NewRelease

The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer

This short novel is a paean to university poetry classes and obsessive love, through the intensely self-centric lens of a student away from home for the first time, groping her way toward adulthood as a queer woman in Toronto. As a deep-dyed introvert I know well the second-guessing and excruciating post-action analysis that can go into every encounter with another human. 

This tale will surely speak to many young women exploring their sexuality once they’ve finally left their conservative small-town lives behind.  However, the lack of development in any secondary characters may feel myopic if not claustrophobic. More mature readers may find the on-off-on relationship between the two adult women more worthy of interrogation than it receives at Natalie‘s hands. Her lack of curiosity about her lover’s life or interests--beyond 'Are you thinking about me when I'm not here?--and her occasional afterthought shows of interest in the doings of her friends and fellow students came across as selfish rather than sympathetic. 

The writing is sometimes lyrical although reading about poetry the protagonist is reading, or wrote, or might write someday, is hardly as compelling as reading the poetry itself could be. While I appreciate the excavation of a slow coming-out process, I would have liked to see this introverted, largely oblivious protagonist gain some understanding of relationships deeper than “that is the one I was in then, and this is the one I’m in now.” 

This novel came to me via Netgalley in expectation of my honest review.

The Adult

  Bronwyn Fischer

#Netgalley #lgbtq #university #comingout #comingofage #lesbian #parenting #shortbooks

Of Light and Shadow

"When they don’t give us our birthright, we steal it." 

The title doesn't do justice to this surprisingly compact Indian/Zoroastrian influenced fantasy novel that's so much more than good versus evil despite its bandit-versus-prince opening gambit. These pages are rife with magic systems and mythologies, politics, environmentalism, societal collapse, spirituality, racial biases, all wound around a grudging role-reversed romantic dance between the female bandit leader and the princely hostage.

I find the magic system interesting. Even healing magic exacts a penalty from the user, and our healer sometimes reflects on the perils and pitfalls of their position in ways that feel very real for someone both depended on and not quite trusted. In some senses this echoes the attitude from villagers towards herbal wise women in Europe in the witch burning years, although so far nobody has tried to burn our healer except one patient whose pain has overridden her control of her fire magic.

The environmental plot is well foreshadowed before it appears overtly on the page and forces our prince into a moral dilemma, caught between what he believes is right for the people of the damaged region, and his loyalty to his family.

It does seem that our very sympathetic female protagonist gets shorter shift as the novel unfolds. Rather than becoming more complex and facing deeper ethical or psychological or physical challenges, she seems destined to be reduced to a reluctant love interest. Fortunately, she eventually regains more equal footing with the Peri Prince.

This is a satisfying blend of environmentalism and magic, both light and shadow, that dwells within the characters as well as in the plot. Overall it’s a novel that feels more exotic than its lean writing and straightforward plot suggests. A most enjoyable read.

 

 
Of Light and Shadow

 
A Fantasy Romance Novel Inspired by Indian Mythology
Author: Tanaz Bhathena

 

 

#OfLightAndShadow #fantasy #Zoroastrian #India #royals #rivalry #familydysfunction #speculativefiction #Netgalley #YA

 

 

STANDING IN THE SHADOWS by Peter Robinson

 

There’s something moving about reading a book from an author whose early work you know well, when it is published after he’s gone. So it is with Peter Robinson‘s last Inspector Banks novel.

This is another split-timeline story. The earlier sections are set in winter of 1980, when a university student is briefly a suspect in the murder of his ex-girlfriend. He’s trying to figure out what happened by questioning her friends and family. After a dramatic start, those plot sections rather devolve into a slow meander through 1980 university life with minor forays into the recent doings of the victim. We don’t much care about the student who is suspected, and we hardly learn anything to make us mourn the student who was killed.

The contemporary novel sections involve a years-old unidentified corpse that is turned up by archaeologists surveying the site of a future shopping mall. With no reason beyond mere curiosity to care about this unidentified collection of bones and bits of leather or metal, we can only plod along as Banks directs his team on lines of potential inquiry, occasionally buying them drinks, and generally showing why he’d be a nice boss to have. Old case threads and characters get some page time. Favours get called in from pals in high and low places. No more about archaeology, and the archaeologist rather fades away without leaving any impact, despite being one of the first (and only) interesting characters we meet. There’s a lot about music of the era, which bands were hot and which not, amid a few digressions into the spreading news that John Lennon was killed.

I found myself wondering how much of the manuscript was written many years ago and never quite reached publication in its original form. Could it have been updated with the investigation set in 2019, to feature the ageing Banks still cleaning up the mess from his previous case?

The book’s interesting enough in its way, and competent as usual, but not a ‘final book’ in any sense beyond the author's passing and the characters' occasional glances backward. We'll never know now how Robinson might have retired--or killed--his venerated Inspector, or what plans he might have had for the many sidekicks and side characters. Read it if you’re a longtime fan, if only for the poignancy of knowing it is the final book from a prolific and widely respected author.

 

#PeterRobinson #InspectorBanks #NetGalley #ARC #CrimeFiction #British 

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

If you don’t dislike everybody, is the author even trying? 

Birnam Wood, the wood, is Macbeth’s downfall coming for him in ways he did not at all foresee. 

Birnam Wood, the group, is a loose collective devoted to growing food in underused urban spaces. 

Birnam Wood, the novel centers on Mira, the self-absorbed self-proclaimed leader and idea-generator of BW, her quiet sidekick/roommate Shelley who handles all the real, boring, administrative work out of chronic self-doubt and need for Mira’s approval, and Tony, a trust fund grandson who can’t settle to anything but obsessing over his once-upon-a-time drunken hookup with Mira. 

They and their largely nameless fellow travelers maintain dozens of urban food sites with and without permission, electrical connections, and legit water supplies, dispersing their harvests among land providers, each other, and the city’s food charities. Nobody can fault their work ethic, even if their self-absorption and petty squabbles make for dull reading until nearly a quarter of the way through the tome. 

This is not eco-thriller territory. What little action occurs is all tiny and mundane, on the scale of washing dishes or having a bowl of soup, and almost entirely lacking in suspense or tension or danger. As many reviewers before me have mentioned, you can probably skip or skim the first 100 pages and enjoy the rest as a thriller no more improbable than any Bond movie, although with a more ambiguous ending.

Eventually, Mira’s newest self-laudatory scheme brings them into the orbit of billionaire capitalist plunderer Robert, another prime candidate for the blind hubris of a Macbeth marching obvious to his own doom. 

After stumbling over Mira in a place she has no business being, Robert decides to use the collective for PR cover while he secretly strips a lot of rare-earth minerals out of a national park, destroying irreplaceable ecosystems as a disregarded byproduct. A bit of psychological manipulation and a judicious infusion of cash brings Mira, and thus the BW collective, into his personal puppet show. 

It’s a classic environmentalists-versus-capitalists tale except, as mentioned above, you don’t care about any of them. Well, maybe Shelley, once she stops being Mira’s doormat. But fear not: you’ll surely despise her later, albeit for different reasons (in truth, the environmentalists separately and together are about as appealing as King Lear’s problematic daughters and far less fun than Macbeth's three witches). 

The Birnam Wood lot are the good-banal: white and middle class, given to intellectual/philosophical polemics, virtue-signaling, and purity-testing…in other words, all the leftist habits routinely memed and mocked by the political right. The capitalist plunderer is the bad-banal: a billionaire with all the tech toys, unlimited cash, and unquestioning goons to follow his increasingly unethical orders. He’s a big-headed cartoon villain out of leftist conspiracy theories, whose every public action is cover for an evil plot that in itself is cover for an even more evil plot. 

Despite all the words expended in their respective self-justifying inner monologues (and there are a LOT of those), none of these characters rise above the level of caricature. Given fewer wordy inner monologues and more actions indicative of emotional truth, I might have been moved by the increasingly dire plights of the collective members. But they were as painted trees dragged about the stage by a guiding hand not the equal of the author of Macbeth. 

The thriller part starts to crank up steam around the half, and thereafter gains pace as well as some gross improbabilities that would be easier to overlook in a 2-hour movie than in a novel. Given the collective’s focus, there is less garden or vegetative imagery than you might expect, although the tidbit that fennel inhibits the growth of other plants makes a rather neat metaphor for both Robert and Mira. There are some shaky forensic assumptions that wouldn’t fool most watchers of modern crime shows. For the grand finale, picture Hamlet by way of South American drug cartels. 

The novel is competently written in plain language and – no mean feat - manages to be even-handed in its disdain for all sides in the environmentalists-versus-capitalists battle. The most convincing part, for me, was the cynical presentation of just how readily governments local and national let environmental protections fall by the wayside through inadequate regulation, lax oversight, and non-existent enforcement. None of these cutout characters can beat a real-live politician for sheer self-centered hubris and willingness to overlook or whitewash almost any environmental or social catastrophe if by so doing he/they can gain a single scintilla more power or influence or favourable press.

#ecothriller #BirnamWood #Shakespeare #NewZealand #politicians #environment #RareEarthMinerals #mining #NationalPark #hubris #NetGalley #review #amreading #crimefiction