Category: Reviews

Book review: The Girl With the Louding Voice by Abi Daré

The girl with the louding voice book coverThe Girl With the Louding Voice by Abi Daré is a book I probably wouldn’t have picked out in a shop, as I’m a little tired of all the novels with titles that begin “The Girl…”, particularly as most of them are about grown women. But when a friend offered to lend me this Nigerian novel, I looked it up and was intrigued. I’m glad I gave it a chance.

For one thing, the girl of the title, Adunni, really is a girl. Which is especially key as her story begins with her being married off aged 14 because her father needs the money from her dowry to keep paying rent. She is suddenly the third wife of a middle-aged man, who demands total obedience and turns a blind eye when his first wife beats Adunni. She is expected to be silent, meek and subservient but it is not in Adunni’s character to fade into the background. Her curiosity and boldness repeatedly bring her trouble.

All Adunni wanted in life was to stay in school and become a teacher. She had no interest in marriage, unlike many of her friends. So she struggles to find any sympathy when she complains of her situation on the rare occasions she can get out of her new home. She’s desperate to educate herself and reads everything she can get hold of.

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Book review: Sunset by Jessie Cave

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Sunset book coverSometimes I love a book while I’m reading it but two weeks later I have largely forgotten it. In other cases, I not only remember details but find myself reflecting on them day after day. Sunset by Jessie Cave falls into the latter category: a highly enjoyable but also profound novel.

I really want to share this recommendation with everyone, but it’s going to be tough to talk about Sunset without spoilers. Even my one-sentence review on Instagram arguably included a spoiler! So I’m going to do a brief spoiler-free review, then a very clear spoiling warning before delving into the key subject matter. (The plot summary on Storygraph does an admirable job of getting the essence of the book while remaining spoiler-free.)

This is the story of sisters Ruth and Hannah, narrated by younger sibling Ruth. They’re very different people but have maintained a close relationship into their late 20s. Hannah is grounded, always in a serious long-term relationship, has a career and runs a charity on the side that gives books to children who can’t otherwise afford them. Ruth’s life is…messier. She has been floundering since art school, working zero-hours contracts, mostly at fast-food outlets. She sleeps on a mattress on the floor and survives largely on caffeine and sugar.

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Book review: The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See

Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane book coverIt can be disconcerting to realise which historical events were contemporaneous. The Aztec empire was at its height in 1519, the same year in which Leonardo da Vinci died and Catherine Howard (fifth wife of Henry VIII) was born. Japan ended its Sakoku period of isolation in 1868, the same year as the first bicycle race was held in Paris and the first traffic lights were installed in London.

I tend to think of the Cultural Revolution in China as something that happened ages ago, even though it ended just a few years before I was born. The novel The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See brought it into perspective for me as its main character is almost exactly my age, yet her life is intrinsically linked to the end of the Cultural Revolution and the period of reform that followed.

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Book review: A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: the Journey of Doaa Al Zamel by Melissa Fleming

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A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea book coverI’m a little unsure how to feel about this book. Melissa Fleming is a UNHCR bigwig and she wanted to draw attention to the plight of refugees by highlighting one true story. The one she chose is a doozy. A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: the Journey of Doaa Al Zamel is an action-packed and informative tale. But right from the start I had some concerns.

Doaa Al Zamel had certainly been through the wringer by the time Fleming met her. She is Syrian, an educated young woman from a middle-class family. She had a place waiting for her at university in Damascus and took place in anti-government demonstrations during the Arab Spring, until the civil war made life intolerable in her home city Daraa.

The Al Zamel family fled to Egypt, where they were initially well looked after, before the sheer number of refugees turned the tide of public opinion and national policy. Doaa and her fiance – a fellow Syrian refugee she met in Egypt – tried to escape across the Mediterranean via people smugglers no less than three times before her final horrific journey ended in one of the worst shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. Doaa became a minor celebrity as the Italian press lauded her role in saving a baby.

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Book review: Brown Baby by Nikesh Shukla

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brown baby book coverJust when I’ve got used to the recent trend of memoirs written in the form of a series of essays, journalist and novelist Nikesh Shukla adds a new twist in his book Brown Baby. While each chapter takes a different topic from his own life, they are not essays but instead letters to his eldest daughter, affectionately nicknamed Ganga. 

Except that his daughter is still young (under 10, I believe) so she most likely won’t be reading this book for a while yet. It’s certainly not written as though it’s intended for primary-school-aged children and Shukla acknowledges a few times that his intended audience won’t be his first reader, that she will come to it in several years’ time, if at all.

So why this format? It’s a hook, of course; not many books are written in second person. And it was probably a useful exercise for Shukla to organise his thoughts when approaching writing this. But it does also add a layer of meaning for us readers who aren’t children of Shukla’s. Initially it feels intrusive, like this is genuinely a personal letter from a father to a daughter, in which he opens up to her for possibly the first time. But once I got past the feeling I was eavesdropping, I think the format made this more impactful.

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K-drama review: Suspicious Partner

Suspicious Partner
Ji Chang-wook and Nam Ji-hyun play lawyers in Suspicious Partner.

Yup, K-drama did it again – they managed to combine a genuinely tense murder mystery with a sweet, silly romance and come up with a result that’s entertaining. Suspicious Partner (SBS 2017) is about two lawyers who fall in love – and at the end of the first episode, one of them is arrested for murder.

Noh Ji-uk (Ji Chang-wook) is a prosecutor and Eun Bong-hi (Nam Ji-hyun) is a lawyer who briefly works for him during her training. There is a clear spark between them but they are both smarting from having been cheated on by long-term partners and are wary of new love. Then Bong-hi’s ex-boyfriend is found dead in her apartment and his father – who happens to be the chief prosecutor – presses Ji-uk hard to charge Bong-hi with murder. It’s an inauspicious start for a romance.

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Book review: Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci

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Taste book cover

I’ve had a soft spot for actor Stanley Tucci since his brief stint on ER, though I was aware of him before that. His food-and-travel TV show Searching for Italy is a true delight, a relentlessly positive journey around the gastronomic delights of probably my favourite cuisine, with the gorgeous backdrop of Italy’s stunning scenery.

Between making series one and two, Tucci wrote a memoir – Taste: My Life Through Food. As the title suggests, he tells his life story through memories of meals, foods, cooking and eating. Despite his fame and years of worldwide travel, family and home seem to be hugely important to Tucci – and central to both, for him, is food.

He says this emphasis on food is a legacy of his Italian heritage. It certainly sounds like his childhood home was filled with food far more delicious – and healthy – than his school friends’. A year of his youth was spent in Italy, a revelation of new foods and ingredients.

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Book review: The Mountains Sing by Nguyén Phan Qué Mai

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The Mountains Sing book coverSometimes a book breaks your heart but you love it anyway. For me, The Mountains Sing by Nguyén Phan Qué Mai hit that spot. It’s a novel about Vietnam through most of the twentieth century, told through one family.

After a very brief prelude, it opens in Hanoi in 1972. Twelve-year-old Hương and her grandmother Diệu Lan are running to a bomb shelter as the air raid sirens sound yet again. Hương’s parents and uncles have disappeared down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to fight in the war. Years later, Hương can only hope no news is good news.

Hương and her grandmother decide they must walk up into the mountains with only the food and clothing they can carry, in search of safety from the American bombs. They return months later to a devastated Hanoi and must piece a life back together, including literally rebuilding their home.

This tale is interspersed with the story of Diệu Lan’s childhood further south, in central Vietnam. Like Hương has experienced in her short life, Diệu Lan had a happy, comfortable home until a series of invaders culminating with the Japanese unsettled everything, and then came the blow of the North Vietnamese Communists, who took an extreme, violent approach to redistribution of wealth.

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Book review: How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee

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How We Disappeared book cover

When a book gets a lot of hype on publication, it can be hit or miss whether I like it. Even a very good book can be spoiled by expectations that are too high. But How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee is one of the cases where I absolutely agree with all the five-star reviews. This novel is excellent.

It’s set in Singapore, with two timelines. In the year 2000 two people are trying to uncover secrets from the Japanese occupation during the Second World War. Wang Di is an old woman who has her own terrible memories of that time. Kevin is a 12-year-old boy desperate to help his father by following up on his grandmother’s deathbed confession.

While both our lead characters have their struggles, the stakes are rather different. As the novel opens, Wang Di’s husband has just died, leaving her alone. She never learned to read, and scrapes a living by collecting scrap to resell for recycling. In her husband’s last days, Wang Di finally told him the story she had hidden for more than 50 years – though he guessed some of it the day they met. But he died before there was time for him to reciprocate – to tell her his own war story. Now Wang Di is filled with regret. And shame, as her neighbours laugh at her and call her names.

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Book review: Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

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Earthlings book cover

In 2020 when Earthlings by Sayaka Murata came out (in translation from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori) everyone was raving about it. Our local bookshop Storysmith promoted it as one of their bookseller favourites (technically they’re no longer our closest bookshop thanks to the sudden boom in indie bookshops in Bristol, but that’s a topic for another blog post). I was intrigued, and I’d really liked Murata’s previous novel Convenience Store Woman, but I was feeling guilt about how little I was reading (for me) so I put buying new books on hold. Then this summer I fed a friend’s cat while they were on holiday and as a thank you they bought me this. Yay for awesome friends who know the way to my heart.

Like her bestselling previous novel, Murata’s hero in Earthlings is a woman who is emotionally disconnected from the world. But in Natsuki’s case, this may not be due to an innate neurodifference, but rather trauma. Or perhaps a combination.

We meet Natsuki as a child. She believes that her cuddly toy hedgehog Piyyut is an alien from the planet Popinpobopia, a country she first heard of from her beloved cousin Yuu, who she only sees during the summer holidays they spend in the mountains at her grandparents’ home. Yuu claims he is also Popinpobopian and is searching for a spaceship to take him home.

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