Category: Reviews

K-drama review: Hometown Cha Cha Cha

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

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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TV review: Back to 15

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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Book review: Butter by Asako Yuzuki

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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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Book review: Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

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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Book review: Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

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Enter GhostAfter a year of war, starvation, genocide, reading books by Palestinian authors feels like such a tiny, insignificant act. But – alongside campaigning, writing to MPs, boycotting and divesting – I do think there is real value in sharing Palestinian stories. Sadly I think there are people who need reminding that Palestinians are human beings, who had stuff going on in their lives beyond minute-to-minute survival before all this. And for the rest of us, learning everything we can about Palestine past and present certainly can’t hurt.

Perhaps most important, I want to share genuinely good books by less-well-known authors. And while there are many excellent Palestinian writers, very few could be considered well known. So I will continue scouring all the lists of Palestinian books, buying them, reading them and sharing them.

British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad features on a lot of those lists, and in particular her 2023 novel Enter Ghost. It’s about Sonia, a Palestinian-British actress who finds herself without work for the summer after a disastrous affair with a director, whose casting promises evaporate when they break up. So she decides to visit her sister Haneen who lives in Haifa (in what is now Israel), where their grandparents lived. While there, Sonia is talked into joining the cast of an Arabic production of Hamlet in Ramallah, directed by her sister’s friend Mariam.

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September 2024 reading round-up

A quieter month finally. Fatigue kicked in a little after our busy summer so I’ve read less than usual but the four books I finished were all good, two of them excellent.

Last week I saw Elif Shafak speak about her new book There Are Rivers In the Sky. As expected she was smart, eloquent and humane. And the new novel sounds amazing, of course, but I also realised there are still several books from her backlist I haven’t read yet. So my to-read list got longer again.

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Book review: Boy Friends by Michael Pedersen

boy friends book coverThe world is hardly lacking stories about male friendship but we rarely hear about those friendships in romantic or passionate language. There are plenty of examples of female friendships that are romanticized, passionate, even obsessive. But I think society pushes us to believe men don’t experience friendship like that. Michael Pedersen is here to show that society is wrong on that point.

He wrote Boy Friends: a Memoir of Joy, Grief and Male Friendship in the months immediately following the death of his best friend Scott. Scott isn’t actually named until the final line of the acknowledgements at the back of the book, because the entire memoir is written directly to him. Emotions don’t get much more intense than in a letter to a loved one who’s just died and this book certainly has intensity and passion. It also has humour and quiet contemplation, self-scrutiny and hope.

“More than missing dinner, eating dinner with you, sharing dishes and stories, cocooned in, is the thing I will miss most of all. Just me and you and scran and sincerity and silliness and smut…A scientist working with gorillas in the Congo has discovered that these great apes hum and tunefully exhale while eating, composing hoppity food songs. Via euphonic noise-making, and body percussion, we did the very same – composed mealtime melodies. Dinnertime has been an awful lot quieter since you left.”

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Two book reviews: Rosewater and Rosewater

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Two paper back books called Rosewater

A couple of months ago I spotted that I had two books on my TBR with the same title. Rosewater by Liv Little and Rosewater by Tade Thompson are very different novels but I thought it might be interesting to read them back to back.

In one book Rosewater is a poem, in the other it’s the name of a town, but both refer obliquely to the scented product. The poem is an ode to a person who wears that particular scent. The town is in its early days especially smelly, so the name is ironic.

Little’s book follows Elsie, a 28-year-old poet in London struggling with debt in the gig economy. In short succession she loses her home and almost loses her job thanks to a racist customer. To keep a roof over her head she must go crawling to her best friend Juliet, but there is beef in their recent past they haven’t dealt with.

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K-drama review: Start-Up

Start-up still image

I felt the need for a light-hearted K-drama and Netflix assured me Start-Up (tvN 2020) fit the bill. It’s certainly at the lighter end of TV fare but not the comedy I was hoping for. It’s basically a cheesy romance with a B storyline about tech start-ups.

As always, the centre of the story is a love triangle. This one is more convoluted than most, but actually did keep me guessing for a few episodes which guy would get the girl.

We meet Seo Dal-mi as a young teen. When her parents divorce they tell Dal-mi and her older sister In-jae to choose which parent they want to live with. The sisters choose differently and are separated. To cheer Dal-mi up, her Grandmother hatches a plan with her 18-year-old lodger, Han Ji-pyeong. He becomes a penfriend to Dal-mi but they don’t use his real name, they pick the name of a kid from a story in the newspaper: Nam Do-san. For a year they exchange letters and Dal-mi believes herself in love. Then Ji-pyeong leaves for university and the letters stop.

Cut to 15 years later. Dal-mi (played by Bae Suzy of Uncontrollably Fond and Anna), having chosen to stay with her perpetually in debt father, couldn’t afford university. She works a series of temp jobs and dreams of following in her now-deceased father’s footsteps and starting her own business.

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