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Category: Reviews

Book review: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler

April 6, 2025

Parable of the Sower book cover

Thank you again to the organisers of the Banned Book Club on BlueSky for prompting me to read this modern classic of dystopian fiction, Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler. I listened to the audio book read by Lynne Thigpen, which meant I couldn’t highlight quotes but it did really bring it alive.

In diary entries starting from 2024, teenager Lauren details what it takes to survive in an alternate California. The US is increasingly unstable between severe climate change; escalating privatisation of resources and services; and a scary drug that gives users a high from watching fire burn. Lauren lives in a gated community with her Black preacher father, Hispanic stepmother and gaggle of stepbrothers.

A gated community sounds fancy, but this is just an ordinary neighbourhood on the outskirts of LA of people who are at best lower middle class. They have had to put up walls, rigged alarms, set up 24-hour watches. They seem at first to be managing well. Several families grow some food in their gardens; one family breeds rabbits for food; most families have one person with a paying job. They trade between themselves, the teenagers date each other, the parents take turns teaching essential life skills to the children.

But they are under constant threat of robbery, violence, fire. When they leave the neighbourhood for weekly shooting practice they must keep constant watch for attacks from humans and feral dogs.

Added to this, Lauren has hyper empathy, literally feeling the pain and ecstasy of any people near her. Which is not helpful when surrounded by violence. She knows that worse times are coming and tries to encourage friends to prepare but they reject her warnings. All she can do is prepare herself.

Continue reading “Book review: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler”

Kate Gardner Reviews

Book review: Wicked by Gregory Maguire

March 21, 2025 1 Comment

Wicked book coverAs if to prove his point in his author’s introduction, the first few chapters of Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire include: slut shaming; puppet porn; mob violence and a pretty detailed childbirth. This book is very much not for children. It is so much better, darker and more politically complex than I had expected from having seen the musical years ago on the West End.

This is not a sweet and light tale of female friendship regretfully torn apart by loving the same man. It’s a politically complex novel about the spread of right-wing ideology and one woman who finds that not playing along with the majority opinion comes at a high cost. Put another way, it’s Elphaba’s story, from birth to death.

Oz is a land slowly falling to a dictator – the Wizard – who is sowing hate and discord to divide and conquer the four previously autonomous regions around Emerald City. Elphaba is the daughter of a preacher and a woman who is already unhappy before her first child is born with green skin. Everyone fears her, child and adult.

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Kate Gardner Reviews

Book review: The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher

March 8, 2025

The Skin and its Girl cover

The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher is one of the stories of Palestinian diaspora that I have been particularly excited to get hold of. Reviews made it sound right up my street – and it absolutely is. It celebrates language and storytelling; questions ideas of truth and honesty; features queerness; and is beautifully written.

Betty Rumanni tells the story of her life so far, starting with the day of her birth. At first she wasn’t breathing, doctors thought she was dead, then she took her first breath and her skin turned cobalt blue. Betty’s skin has been bright blue ever since.

This is not some alternative universe where some people are blue-skinned. Betty is one-of-a-kind. And while it’s a clear metaphor for standing out as an Arab American “soon after 9/11”, it also makes for a kind of modern myth.

It becomes clear that Betty is telling her story to a specific person, her great aunt Nuha. Or more accurately, Nuha’s grave. Betty is trying to figure out whether to stay in America to take care of her mother, or to follow her girlfriend overseas to build a new life together. But more than that, she is trying to piece together her aunt’s story and that of the Rumanni family.

Betty’s knowledge of the Rumanni family largely comes from Nuha’s bedtime stories. There’s a family feud relating to a soap factory in Nablus; a girl who follows a silver gazelle to Haifa; even a tattooed ogre. And mixed in with these stories of Palestine are Bible stories, retold by someone who believes in God but does not feel God has ever been there for her. How do these tales relate to the friction between her grandmother Saeeda and great aunt Nuha in America? Are these the roots of Betty’s mother Tashi’s fragile mental health?

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Kate Gardner Reviews

Book review: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

February 22, 2025

Woman on the Edge of Time book cover

I forget where I heard about Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, but as its cover proclaims it is “the classic feminist novel” and it’s speculative fiction written a woman, it’s not hard to see why I added it to my wishlist at some point.

This is quite a dark, grim, even shocking, book. And it’s also a vision of a hopeful, more equal future. Or is it?

In 1970s New York City, middle-aged Connie tries to stand up to her niece’s abusive pimp and he has her committed to a mental institution. Conditions there are pretty bleak and no-one listens to her, or any other patient – particularly people of colour. Connie is Hispanic, which means she isn’t treated quite as badly as Black patients but she is still “othered” by the doctors, spoken of as more animal than human. What it comes down to is these patients are all poor, and therefore expendable. And she is also a woman, while the pimp is a man. Connie’s one relief from her awful situation is her ability to contact a community in the far future.

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Kate Gardner Reviews

Book review: This House by Sian Northey

January 24, 2025 1 Comment

This House book coverSeeing as I chose it as one of my top five books of last year, you already know I loved This House by Sian Northey, translated from Welsh by Susan Walton. It’s a gentle, quiet novel about old age, grief, friendship and home.

We meet Anna arriving home from hospital on crutches, hobbling around the remote house called Nant yr Aur, where she lives alone. But she doesn’t have to cope entirely on her own. Soon we meet her friend Emyr, who drops in on her most days. He’s a farmer and her only neighbour within walking distance. They’re both getting old and though Emyr has a wife and two grown sons at home, he clearly values Anna’s friendship.

Between Emyr’s visits, Anna reflects back on her life in the house, prompted by a letter she’s received from someone offering to buy it. This isn’t the first offer she’s had, and she doesn’t plan to accept, but it’s made her reminisce. We learn she had a partner once, Ioan; in fact, the house was his, but she was the one who fell in love with it. When Anna decides to meet Sîon, the young man who’s made the offer, they strike up an unlikely friendship.

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Kate Gardner Reviews

K-drama review: Hometown Cha Cha Cha

December 29, 2024December 30, 2024

Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha posterHometown Cha Cha Cha (tvN 2021) is a sweet, gentle romcom told over 24 hours of television. Like all the better K-dramas it takes its time to establish characters and tell their story without overstaying its welcome. I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Yoon Hye-jin (Shin Min-a) is a dentist in Seoul. When she refuses to recommend unnecessary expensive treatments to her patients she is fired. In a thoroughly low place, she decides to spend a few hours in Gongjin, a seaside town her family used to visit when she was young.

A series of mishaps conspire to keep her in this small town for the day and night. And also to repeatedly put her in contact with Hong Du-sik (Kim Seon-ho, who was also in Start-Up). A jack-of-all-trades, he is affectionately called Chief Hong by the town’s residents. When a couple of residents casually mention that Gongjin doesn’t have a dentist, the seed of an idea is planted. It’s about time for Hye-jin to start her own practice, and it need only be for a year or so, until she can move back to Seoul.

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Kate Gardner Reviews

Book review: Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj

December 16, 2024December 17, 2024

Behind You is the Sea coverEvery new book is a gamble. Unless you’ve read it before, you don’t really know what you’re getting. Sure, there are some ways to mitigate risk. Tried and tested author; recommendation from a friend or book blogger who shares your taste; perhaps a bookseller or book club you’ve found you jibe with. But even the best of these can end in disappointment. Not every book can be a gem.

So it’s an extra big risk to pre-order a not-yet-published book by an unknown author based solely on a random Bookstagram post. What can I say? They were persuasive: a way to financially support Palestinian authors and encourage more publishers to work with them is to pre-order their books. Demonstrate there is a demand. So I pre-ordered Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj, mostly forgot about it and then a couple of months later got a lovely surprise in the post.

I actually don’t mind the risk of not loving a book. Makes it easier to decide which ones to keep after reading, which ones to even finish. But in this case I did love the book. And that’s despite some narrative decisions that haven’t always worked for me in the past.

This novel is about three Palestinian families in Baltimore, Maryland. Each chapter concentrates on a different character from these families, following them closely for days, weeks or even months. There are big time jumps between each chapter as well, so that by the end of the book decades have passed. Some chapters only have a small cast, others feature dozens of people – a lot of whom will have appeared in previous chapters or go on to appear again later.

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Kate Gardner Reviews

TV review: Back to 15

December 10, 2024

I have to give credit to Charlie Jane Anders for pointing me towards this TV gem. Her newsletter Happy Dancing always ends with recommendations for books, films, TV and/or music and the recs I’ve followed up I’ve always enjoyed. De Volta Aos 15 (Netflix 2022–2024) is a Brazilian comedy-drama coming-of-age series with LGBTQ characters and is a lot of fun. There’s also time travel!

Anita (played by Camila Queiroz) is 30 and her life is in a rut. When she goes back to her hometown Imperatriz for her sister Luiza’s wedding, she sees that it’s true of most people she knows: they’re all stuck in lives that don’t really make them happy. So when she sits down in her childhood bedroom and finds herself reliving her first day of high school when she was 15, it seems clear what she has to do. Anita (now played by Maisa) is going to fix everyone else’s life and then she’ll magically jump back to her real life, right?

This not only goes predictably badly wrong in the past, but when Anita suddenly returns to her 30-year-old life it has changed significantly. She needs to get back to 2006 and do something differently. Which she does – over and over again for two seasons.

This show is gloriously fun. There’s the 2006 fashion and music. There’s high school drama, with love triangles ahoy. There’s hapless 30-year-old drama, in which Anita thinks she knows best and is repeatedly distracted by her love life. And there’s friendship – so much friendship.

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Kate Gardner Reviews

Book review: Butter by Asako Yuzuki

December 7, 2024January 15, 2025 2 Comments

I don’t read all the books that get a tonne of hype, but I try not to be prejudiced against them either. If a blogger or bookseller I know shares my taste – or even better, a friend – recommends a book to me, I’ll give it a chance. And let’s face it, Butter by Asako Yuzuki (translated by Polly Barton) has been everywhere this year. But thanks to a friend recommending it, I get it. Because it’s really good. And even better, it contains a lot to talk about.

The narrative (mostly) follows Rika, a journalist at a prestigious weekly news magazine in Tokyo. Unmarried in her mid-30s, she is at once judged and admired for being a careerwoman – not an easy thing to be in Japan, we’re told. She’s the only woman in her department and works long hours, often seven days a week. She lives on junk food and sees her sort-of boyfriend Makoto only occasionally – usually when he is out drinking late and needs a nearby bed to sleep in.

Her best friend is Reiko, in some ways Rika’s opposite. Reiko is married, cooks every night and has quit her job in PR while she tries to get pregnant. She’s also full of curiosity and (genuinely) helpful advice for her friend.

With the prospect of a promotion on the horizon, Rika needs a big story and she might now have it. Convicted serial murderer Manako Kajii is awaiting retrial at Tokyo Detention House. She would date rich men, cook gourmet food for them, lived a lavish lifestyle thanks to them, and then one by one they died in mysterious circumstances. It was a huge sensational case, in part because Kajii was already Internet famous, with a popular blog about food and cooking.

Kajii has never given an interview to the press, but Rika thinks she can be persuaded by someone open to the possibility of her innocence. Rika is certain that all the press around Kajii’s original trial was steeped in misogyny and fat-shaming, which may have influenced the jury.

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Kate Gardner Reviews

Book review: Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

November 3, 2024

I would never have picked up a book about boxing but Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel was sent to me as part of the Good Book Club subscription. And then I saw it was longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, so I figured it was time to give it a try. I didn’t love it but I do think the writing is great, Bullwinkel is talented and the only negative for me is the boxing. Which arguably isn’t the point of the novel at all.

Headshot follows the finals of the Women’s 18 And Under Daughters of America Cup. Over two days, eight young women compete to be the US national youth champion. Each chapter follows one match, describing both the bout itself and the thoughts of the two fighters. We get brief flashes back to their lives so far and flashes forward to the futures ahead of them, so that in 240 pages eight stories are told, stories that intersect at this one point.

These are not rich girls; their backgrounds vary from dirt poor to lower middle class. They are all aware this might be the one time in their life they have a shot at winning something notable. Some have family expectations resting on them but most are here under personal ambition alone. Which makes the wins and losses personal too.

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Kate Gardner Reviews

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