Book review: Stinkbug by Sinead Stubbins

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Satirical corporate gothic novel Stinkbug by Sinéad Stubbins is a foray into the lunacy of corporate culture. 

Edith had been a copywriter at Winked for seven years. It wasn’t a place where people’s job titles were things like ‘Studio Ninja’, but they did say things like that in the office, and only sometimes in an ironic way

The story revolves around Edith, a reliable and responsible copywriter at Winked. She goes on a three day corporate retreat with other selected colleagues to a place called Consequi, a remote mountain getaway. Winked is anticipating a restructure and Edith sees the retreat an an opportunity to demonstrate her ongoing value to the company.

It was hard not to think of the upcoming retreat as somehow being connected to a new sacrifice. There had been rumours about a restructure for months. Usually when Winked’s CEO came to the office, which wasn’t often, he would strut between desks booming, ‘How are we!’ to terrified juniors he didn’t know the names of, clapping them on the back. Now the CEO just rushed into meeting rooms with senior staff and mystery third parties—crucially, the rooms without glass walls. After the meetings, he would appear in the corridors massaging his head and then would be gone again.

Soon after arrival, participants phones are confiscated and they are subjected to an increasingly bizarre series of activities until workplace dynamics and collegiate camaraderie begin to disintegrate. Soon Edith becomes the pariah and must choose to embrace her otherness or conform. She chooses resistance. 

You’re a stinkbug and they’re worried if they come near you, your stench will get all over them and they won’t be able to wash it off.

Stinkbug is for anyone who appreciates the perversity of the office world and its tendency toward power games, toxicity and psychological warfare against those who don’t conform to the dominant cultural sereotype. 

Book review: I Would Meet You Anywhere by Susan Kiyo Ito

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I Would Meet You Anywhere by Susan Kiyo is a memoir about growing up as an adopted Japanese-American, and her quest to locate and develop a relationship with her birth mother. Susan’s adoptive parents were loving and generous people, but this did not prevent a deep struggle with identity. She grappled with a sense of not being enough. Her biracial roots meant she was neither fully American, nor fully Japanese. 

I was never supposed to tell this story. It is challenging to write, and publicly share, a story with holds a secret at its core. I have been that secret my whole life. 

Once found, the relationship with her birth mother, Yumi, was challenging due to the mother’s own struggles with shame. Yumi’s family initially knew nothing about the existence of another child, and Yumi wanted to keep Susan’s existence secret. It makes for an unsettling on-again, off-again relationship controlled by Yumi who frequently disappeared from Susan’s life, then emerged again as if nothing has happened. 

At so many points during the past forty years, I tried to complete this book. Thousands of pages clutter my computer hard drives and landfills. I was always paralyzed by fear that the actual telling of it would mean an end to my relationship with Yumi. I wrote. Then when I reread what I had written, I panicked and set it aside, at times for months or years. I slipped back into the guise of the good, silent adoptee. Then, the burning need to say “I exist” would overcome me, and once again, I’d turn to the manuscript.

While I Would Meet You Anywhere is an intimate and raw exploration of the emotional challenges of growing up as a biracial adoptee and trying to navigate a relationship with a charismatic and frustrating birth parent, the story is also infused with humour. I Would Meet You Anywhere did leave me feeling sad for Susan who’s simple desire to be truly seen and known by her birth mother could never be fully met by Yumi who guarded her privacy fiercely. I found Yumi frustrating due to her inability to open herself to Susan. She was always holding back, unable to resolve her own inner conflicts. A beautifully written and moving story about identity, belonging, adoption, family and generational trauma.

Book review: The Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein

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I read The Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein due to the stellar lineup of authors, and I was not disappointed. I don’t read a lot of true crime and didn’t closely follow the case of Erin Patterson at the time it took place, so only had a peripheral knowledge of it. Patterson was facing three murder charges – the deaths of three family members by poisoned mushrooms in beef wellington. It was a case of life being stranger than fiction. The trial ran for eleven weeks. 

Basically what we’re doing is bearing witness… We’re bearing witness to a rent in the social fabric and how the law is going to deal with it.

The Mushroom Tapes is primarily a series of transcripts from conversations between the three authors driving to and from the courthouse, in coffee shops, or at their hotel. Each writer reflects on the trial, the people involved in, and spectators of the proceedings. They also contemplate what motivates a woman to kill, whether Patterson did it, and question their own motivations for being there as they grapple with the ethics of it.

I’m thinking about the room we’re about to walk into. The sorrow it contains. Medea is an interesting comparison because, like this, it’s a horror story.

The book provides a different perspective to that shown through a media lens. It is their presence in the courtroom as ordinary observers of all those around them, and their observations of the mood up close. For me it was also an interesting insight into the minds of the three women writers and their relationships to one another.  

Sometimes, as a writer, there’s a detail that you don’t know how to deal with … But if you can look at it the right way, it’s a portal into something deeper and bigger.

The Mushroom Tapes is a dialogue driven collaborative work of non-fiction for lovers of true crime and fans of the authors who penned the book (I am writing this while eating mushroom filo…eek!).

Book review: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

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In Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Kathy, now 31, is reflecting on her experience as a student at an English boarding school called Hailsham. I’ve heard very few good stories from friends who attended boarding schools, but Ishiguro takes the experience to a whole new level.

I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how it is with us. It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.

In this dystopian story, Hailsham was established to indoctrinate its students to prepare them for their pre-ordained destiny – as clones for organ harvesting (think Dolly the sheep). Kathy has spent most of her adulthood caring for her peers who have become donors. Their unsettling reality slowly dawns on the reader via Ishiguro’s trickle of details as Kathy recalls her past. 

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

The existence of the Hilsham students is the ultimate form of ‘othering’. They are bred to be sacrificed to extend the lives of the dominant class. The body parts of the Hilsham students will treat life limiting illnesses of the rest of the community – until they expire from losing too much of themselves. The normalisation of this practice is extremely disturbing. The Halisham youth, can, in many ways lead normal lives including having jobs and relationships, but there is a question about whether ordinary life if for all intents and purposes meaningless for them given their destiny, including a short life, is preordained.

We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.

Never Let Me Go is a meditation on life and death, what it means to be human, the shaping of destiny, friendship, the role of art in life and the importance of ethics in science. 

Book review: I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney

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I found I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney hilarious in a laugh out loud way.

One advantage for the dead is that they never have to read your writing.

Bud is a middle aged obituary writer, struggling in the wake of a failed relationship and lack of purpose. On top of all that his recent performance review highlighted a long list of failures – including significant errors in his published work. In one obituary he incorrectly wrote that an 80 year old woman had died by throwing herself off a bridge. What would her grandchildren make of that, his boss asks.

Are we ever fully honest with someone else? I don’t mean to suggest outright lies, but do we really express those quieter, deeper feelings? Those amorphous, hazy things, core things that even we struggle to admit to ourselves. Do we share everything?

Drunk and feeling sorry for himself one night, Bud writes his own obituary and accidentally publishes it to the web. When his company discovers the issue they want to fire him. A legal glitch prevents them – they cannot fire a dead person.

What would you write if you had to write your obituary? Today, right now. What comes to mind? What memories, days, moments? What people and experiences? I realize, at first glance, that the idea of writing one’s own obituary while still alive may sound morbid. It’s not, though. I promise you. It’s a needed reminder of who you are, of what truly matters. Because it’s your life and there’s still time to write it. Before I have to.

While the company tries to sort out Bud’s work situation so they can fire him, they suspend him from work. Bud starts going to the funerals of strangers in a bid to seek meaning in his own life. 

Life prevails. How strange and wondrous. In the midst of death, life prevails, calls to us, begs us, says, Come, please, don’t you dare waste this precious gift.

I See You’ve Called in Dead is a wacky character driven, satirical tale about life, death and purpose.

We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom.

Book review: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

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Booker prize winner, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, has a layered and complex narrative. 

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

An old woman called Iris Griffen reflects on her own life, and her sister Laura’s suicide. The sisters came from a wealthy family, with Iris married off to her father’s business rival in order to rescue the family fortunes after a series of incidents threaten to send him broke. Iris is determined to document her story before she dies, with the hope of it facilitating a reconciliation with her estranged granddaughter Sabrina. 

This is how the girl who couldn’t speak and the man who couldn’t see fell in love.

Iris’s telling of her life is interspersed with chapters from her sister’s novel, The Blind Assassin, published after she drove off a bridge to her death. The book made her posthumously famous, giving her a cult like status. The Blind Assassin is about two anonymous lovers having a secret affair. 

Should is a futile word. It’s about what didn’t happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.

A third narrative is introduced by the anonymous man telling lover a science fiction story about a blind assassin and a sacrificial virgin who fall in love against the odds. A fourth narrative exists in newspaper and magazine stories from the 1930s and ‘40s.

The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.

The pieces of the disparate narratives are masterfully bought together in the final pages. The Blind Assassin is a bleak but beautiful tale about lies, coverups, gender, class, family tragedies and the unreliability of memory. 

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you’d be doomed. You’d be ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.

Book review: Platform Decay by Martha Wells

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Platform Decay by Martha Wells is #8 in The Murderbot Diaries series. The latest instalment was published in May this year. I’m a big fan of this series and you can find reviews about other books on this blog. The protagonist is a Security Robot, or SecUnit, who has managed to hack his own governor module, giving him control over his own actions. As a result he goes on a journey of self actuation. Perfect in this age of AI!

There was nothing I could do about it now, so I watched episode 487 of Sanctuary Moon and tried to pretend none of this was happening.

Over the course of the series, Murderbot has been on an emotional maturing journey – from being horrified by humans and socially anxious (All Systems Red), running away from any mention of emotions (Network Effect) to PTSD (Systems Collapse). In Platform Decay, Murderbot has installed a repaired risk assessment module and a mental health module that provides regular emotion checks. 

Emotion check: If we ran into any human murderers they had better be heavily armed, because I am in a bad fucking mood.

Murderbot is on a rescue mission with another SecUnit named Three to extract Dr. Mensah’s family, including children – ick. Things go a bit pear shaped and becomes way more complicated when a dying enemy asks SecUnit to save their five person crew as well.

Yes, getting one group of humans out and then going back for another go would be exponentially more risky for me and the chances that I would (a) fail, and (b) get dismantled and my parts redistributed in a corporate factory with my organic tissues melted and thrown away like so much garbage were high. (I didn’t want to look at those numbers but the pings from risk assessment were increasingly urgent.) (You know, I think I liked risk assessment better before I tried to fix it, when I knew for sure it was full of shit.)

Murderbot’s internal monologues and external quirks are as dry, hilarious and endearing as ever, and there is plenty of hi jinx and action. Platform Decay is a fun, fast paced novella.

Emotion check: Having someone else support your bad decision feels kind of good.

If you are interested in becoming acquainted with Murderbot I recommend you start with book #1 All Systems Red as you will probably get hooked.

Book review: The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana

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The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana is a story about what happens when bored, discontented, testosterone fuelled boy-men who have grown up with distorted prescriptions for masculinity are left to their own devices and go rouge. It is both disturbing and compelling. 

When two men say hello on the street, one of them loses.

Adam and Teddy have a friendship built on competition, oneupmanship and risk taking in their search for identity in a small town on the west Coast of Canada. They have just finished high school. Adam lives with a father who has banned talk of his mother, and the boy gets much of his advice on life, including how to manipulate girls, from books and podcasts. Teddy has a girlfriend, but is unsure about the man he wants to be. Both want to be seen and to be witnessed.

The road though! Endless becoming, a colour palette always and somehow never changing, grey to green to brown to blue to other, occasionally red, very occasionally yellow, whoosh, repeat, repeat, something comes the other way with headlights on, the beauty of headlights in daylight, fence, field, these lane markings like perforations maybe, as if the road or the whole world could unzip any moment now, if there were such a thing as a moment when you’re driving, which Teddy realizes there isn’t. It’s just one long stretch. The road and its contradictions: boredom and excitement, you sit still but you’re moving, there’s a good kind of silence even with the engine noise and the German metal Adam has them listening to. Teddy’s mom used to call this sitting and thinking time. But all Teddy wants to think about is how the world keeps rushing toward them then dropping harmlessly into their wake. 

The boys hatch a plan to go on a road trip and drive as far as they can. They do not tell their families. When they stop so Teddy can buy a gun, we become certain this trip will end badly. They drive on in the sweltering van – unwashed, tormented by insects, fuelled by energy drinks and chips during the day, and bourbon at night. When they chance across a young couple on the side of the road and make a fatal decision, the reader knows there is no going back and we descend into the young men’s inner worlds as they unravel without remorse.   

Both start unconsciously paring their sentences, seeing how minimal they can make them and still be understood

The Passenger Seat is a skilfully crafted debut novel infused with menace and fear. Its sparse prose holds the reader in tension from the outset and leaves them with a lingering discomfort. 

Book review: The Last Binding trilogy by Freya Marske

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I picked up the first book in The Last Binding trilogy (A Marvellous Light) and was sucked into the magical Edwardian world so deeply that I totally binged on book two (A Restless Truth) and three (A Power Unbound). Freya Marske has set her stories in England where the population is divided into (secret) magicians and non-magicians, political intrigue is rife, and hot queer romance is in the air (content warning if gay sex makes you queasy this trilogy may not be for you!). 

On the contrary, stories are why anyone does anything.

The secret magical population are upper class land owners whose powers are drawn from their relationship with the land. Even their houses are infused with sorcery, and there’s a government office whose purpose is to keep magic out of the view of the general non-magical public. The first instalment revolves around the unmagical Robin and the magical Edwin who are thrust together after an administrative error. They go in search of an ancient contract that threatens all the magicians of England. There are murderous mazes, faceless enemies, family tensions, runes and magical visions.

Of course I’m on your side. You complicated my life,” Robin said warmly. “You woke me up. You’re incredibly brave. You’re not kind, but you care, deeply. And I think you know how much I want you, in whatever way I can have you.

Book two takes place on a passenger ship and revolves around Maud, Robin’s sister who is accompanying an elderly magician to help her brother get to the bottom of the ongoing magical contract conspiracy. When the old lady dies, Maud teams up with Violet, another passenger, the controversial magical actress who agrees to help her try to identify the murderer.  This book includes marauding zoo animals, hijinks, emotional angst, steamy ladies, and helpful gentlemen – including writer-thief, Alan Ross, and Lord Hawthorn who knows a lot about magic, but no longer has any. It turns out the old ladies parrot is hiding something important.

Good to see you, Edwin, old chap. Don’t give my regards to your family. I never liked any of them.

In book three we are back in London with the whole crew. Centre stage are Robin, Edwin, Violet, Maude, Lord Hawthorn (Jack), and Alan all trying to track down the last contract before magical mayhem and catastrophe break out. Jack’s twin sister’s death as a child has a direct link to the magical subterfuge that has haunted the entire trilogy and comes to a head in A Power Unbound. Initially Alan is only in it for the money, until sparks start flying with Jack. Book three has big magic – in people and tetchy houses, ghosts, a magicians version of a shoot out, and some of the most explicit, well crafted sex scenes I’ve ever read.

I suggest a daring stealth adventure, and you have to ruin it by telling me it’s going to involve books

A fun, raunchy, bingeworthy three book fantasy-crime read with whimsical prose and a feel of quality fan fiction to it. I was a little disappointed when the ride ended. 

Book review: Second Place by Rachel Cusk

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Long listed for the Booker Prize in 2021, Second Place by Rachel Cusk is about M, a middle aged writer with a past. While the details of that past are never fully explained to the reader, it remains in the forefront due to M’s fears, insecurities and inner demons. The story is narrated as a letter from M to a person called Jeffers. 

Some people write simply because they don’t know how to live in the moment and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards

M is an anxious woman who lives on an isolated marshland property with her second husband, the easy going Tony. There are two residences on the property – one, a cottage reserved for guests. M invites famous artist, L, to stay. She hopes to become his muse and that he will be inspired by the landscape.

Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?

At first L says no, but then an unspecified event that leaves him in financial difficulties leads him to accept. M had imagined him a soulful visionary artist, but finds him a narcissistic and disagreeable individual. L arrives with a wealthy, beautiful and uninvited young woman called Brett in tow. L is not the man M was expecting and the two are immediately at odds. 

I’m not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don’t understand or sympathise all that much with myself.

Justine, M’s twenty one year old daughter and her boyfriend Kurt, a pretentious aspiring writer also come to stay. What follow is a study of the group dynamics, told through M’s eyes.

You get tired of reality, and then you discover it’s already gotten tired of you.

Second place explores power dynamics, gender, motherhood, marriage, aging and art. The carefully crafted, exquisite language of the book is melancholic and unsettling.