Category: Reviews

Book review: Seesaw by Deborah Moggach

Seesaw book coverDeborah Moggach is one of those authors I’ve seen recommended in many places over the last 20+ years. A few of her novels have been made into films (including These Foolish Things, which became The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) and she has written several screenplays as well. So when a family member was having a book clearout and offered me her novel Seesaw I jumped at it. I will not be jumping at her books in future.

It’s not that it’s a bad book. It’s easy to read, with complex characters and I was entertained. But it’s also fairly predictable, despite a structure that feels intended to surprise or even wrongfoot readers. And its commentary on class and money feels simplistic – very much the perspective of an upper middle class writer.

The story centres on the Price family – suburban middle-class folk with everyday, petty squabbles. They’re members of the rotary club. The younger children go to private school. They bought their oldest child a flat when he went to university and have promised him some very expensive film-editing equipment to kickstart his career. Both parents run their own businesses. They’re ordinary; dull, even.

Then their 17-year-old daughter Hannah goes missing. After a long, increasingly fraught day, the Prices receive a phone call claiming that Hannah has been kidnapped and demanding a very large ransom. They can afford it, but it’s going to clean them out of almost everything they have.

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K-drama review: Anna

Anna posterOur temporary holiday from Netflix means I have access to considerably fewer K-dramas at the moment, but there are still a few scattered between the other big streaming services. Anna (2022) started life as a web series and is currently on Amazon Prime Video in the UK. Unusually for a K-drama it’s only 8 episodes long. I didn’t even bother checking online reviews before giving it a try.

This series is most definitely at the more serious, high-quality drama end of the scale compared with a lot of other TV shows from Korea. But it didn’t drag or take itself too seriously, as I found with Misaeng.

Our main character is Lee Yu-mi (Bae Suzy – a huge Hallyu star I know mainly from Uncontrollably Fond), a young woman from a poor background who tells a lie that should have been small and insignificant but instead changes her life entirely. It also changes the tone of the show from straight drama to psychological thriller.

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Book review: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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The Vanishing Half book cover

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett enjoyed a lot of success and hype when it was first published. I’ve had it on my to-read list ever since, yet I had somehow managed to avoid not only spoilers but any idea of the book’s setting or themes. I quite enjoyed coming to this novel completely fresh, though I doubt it would have marred my pleasure to know more.

In August 1954, identical twin teenage girls Stella and Desiree disappear from the small town of Mallard, Louisiana. In 1968 one sister returns. The story starts from Desiree’s return in 1968, expanding both back and forward from that point to fill in their childhood, the missing years and the future. It is thus a decades-long story but told as a mystery rather than a saga.

Though the core of the story is blood relatives who have split apart to lead very different lives, this novel concentrates more on chosen family. The twins’ mother Adele, widowed young, loves Early – a man who comes and goes from her home and her life, but always come back and is in his own way a loving stepfather to the girls. They never marry and, despite the time and location, this is accepted. Later, her granddaughter chooses a relationship with another man whose only real flaw is that they cannot get married.

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Book review: Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson

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This is why independent bookshops are awesome. I probably would never have heard of Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson if my local bookshop Bookhaus hadn’t held an author event about this debut novel. Though I was unable to attend because I was unwell at the time (my lupus has flared up a little in the last month), the description in the Bookhaus email about the event sounded so good that a few days later I cycled over and bought myself a signed copy.

The story opens in a small coalmining town in South Wales in 1984. It’s the peak of the miner’s strike and Eluned is working all the hours she can to support her family, as her father’s strike wages have trickled to almost nothing, while also turning up to the picket lines and volunteering at fundraising events at the miners hall. It’s a lot, and her sister Mabli’s no help – swanning off with her Thatcher-supporting policeman boyfriend.

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Book review: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

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God of Small Things book cover

I have been hearing praise lavished on this novel since it was first published in the 1990s but somehow The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy still exceeded my expectations. It goes to some tough, dark places but manages to use a playfulness with language to prevent it from being a tough, dark read.

That same playfulness with language also means that the story initially feels elusive, at a distance, even though most of the facts are given to the reader up front. We start with a 31-year-old woman, Rahel, arriving at her childhood home in Kerala after a long absence. She has come because her twin brother Esthappen has also come back. The only other family member living there now is their aunt Baby Kochamma.

We learn early on that something terrible happened when the twins were 7 and that they haven’t seen each other since. Some of the major details are revealed in the first few pages, while other details are saved to almost the final page. It involved their English cousin Sophie, their mother Ammu, the local Communist leader Comrade Pillai and a local man called Velutha who worked in the family’s pickle factory.

Switching between 1969 and 1993, Roy gradually reveals the facts but she also builds the characters piece by piece. When new details are revealed about a character, that becomes another way to refer to them. For instance, 7-year-old Rahel wears her hair “on top of her head like a fountain” in a “Love-in-Tokyo” hair band, and from then on is sometimes simply referred to as “the fountain” or “Love-in-Tokyo”. This is occasionally confusing but for the most part works well to give something like a child’s point of view to the 1969 sections.

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Book review: The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule by Angela Saini

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The Patriarchs book coverHow did men become dominant in human society? When did patriarchy begin? Was it inevitable or could the world have been different? Angela Saini looks at all the available evidence to answer these questions in her book The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule.

Having read (and loved) her previous books Inferior and Superior, I knew I was in safe hands as I embarked on this journey to discover how human inequality began. To begin with two of the few solidly definite answers Saini can provide: no, patriarchy was not inevitable and no, it has not always been the way most human societies are structured. Reaching those answers required sifting through centuries of research, a task at which Saini excels.

Societies that are matrilineal (where family lines are tracked through the mothers) and/or matrilocal (where women stay in their childhood homes to raise their own children – sometimes with husbands going to live with them, sometimes without co-parents ever co-habiting) have existed as far back as prehistory and still exist now in pockets all over the world. Matriliny and matrilocality don’t necessarily equal matriarchy but they do lend themselves to more equal society overall, in which women can hold positions of power, own property and receive education at parity with men.

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K-drama review: Snowdrop

Snowdrop still
Snowdrop alternates between tense action, sweet romance and over-the-top comedy.

When Tim and I agreed to take a break from Netflix to catch up on all the great TV on all the other streaming services we have, my major concern was how would I access K-dramas. Netflix has, I think, a better selection of international TV than any other service, with not just one or two but dozens (if not hundreds) of shows from every country it operates in.

But we really did need to reduce the selection of available TV to a list slightly less overwhelming, and in the four months since we suspended our Netflix account we have barely dented the still very long list of TV shows to catch up on. There were even still a small number of K-dramas available so I thought I really should check one out.

Snowdrop (JTBC 2022) is a political melodrama set in late 1987, when South Korea is finally due to hold a democratic election that will end its dictatorship. It’s largely set in the dormitory of the fictional Hosu Women’s University where the young women live under strict rules. Our heroine is Eun Yeong-ro (played by Jisoo, from the girl group Blackpink), a freshman who is soft-spoken and very private.

When her very popular roommate Ko Hye-ryeong (Jung Shin-hye) is asked out on a group date, Yeong-ro goes along and there she meets Lim Soo-ho (Jung Hae-in, who starred in the film Tune in for Love). There is an immediate spark between them. And then a few days later he turns up in her dorm room covered in blood. He is being chased by the Agency for National Security Planning (ANSP) who claim that he is a North Korean spy. Thinking that this is an excuse from the ANSP to arrest and beat up a pro-democracy protestor, Yeong-ro hides Soo-ho in the dorm.

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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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