Tag: book review

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.

Book review: Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett

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Set in Southern Tasmania, Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett is about three brothers – Joe, Miles and Harry. Miles and Harry live an impoverished life with their abalone fisherman father. The boys mother died in a car accident and their father is a violent drunk. Young adult Joe has left home, but not town, after an altercation with his father. The ocean itself is almost a character – ever present, desolate, and isolated.

Water that was always there. Always everywhere. The sound and the smell and the cold waves making Harry different. And it wasn’t just because he was the youngest. He knew the way he felt about the ocean would never leave him now. It would be there always, right inside him.

Thirteen year old Miles feels trapped working with his father on the fishing boat. Harry who is around eight years old doesn’t have to work the boat as he suffers from sea sickness. He spends much of his time alone until he befriends an old man called George who the local children are afraid of due to deformities. 

There were things that no one could teach you – things about the water. You just knew them or you didn’t and no one could tell you how to read it. How to feel it. Miles knew the water. He could feel it. And he knew not to trust it.

Miles wishes he could leave home or go surfing with his friends. He also feels a sense of responsibility toward his younger brother, to protect him from their father. It is this relationship between Miles and Harry that is the central spine of the book and it is their voices we hear.

Harry picked up an abalone shell, the edges loose and dusty in his hands. And every cell in his body stopped. Felt it. This place. Felt the people who had been here before, breathing and standing live where he stood. People who were dead now. Long gone. And Harry understood it, right down in his guts, that time ran on forever and that one day he would die.

Past the Shallows is a coming of age story written in spare, lyrical prose, about the brother bond, grief, family violence, and the struggles of ordinary life.

Book review: Clean by Alia Trabucco Zeran

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Domestic literary thriller, Clean, by Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán and translated into English by Sophie Hughes, explores domestic labour, class, and inequality. The entire story is narrated by Estela from an interrogation cell she is being held in by police and focusses on events that took place in the house in which she was employed as a nanny.  

By now you’re probably wondering why I stayed. … My answer is the following: Why do you stay in your jobs? In your poky offices, in the factories and the shops on the other side of this wall?

It becomes immediately apparent that the seven year old daughter of her employers drowned. The question of whether it was intentional or an accident is the central question of the novel.

I never stopped believing I would leave that house, but routine is treacherous; the repetition of the same rituals — open your eyes, close them, chew, swallow, brush your hair, brush your teeth — each one an attempt to gain mastery over time. A month, a week, the length and breadth of a life.

Estela began working for a wealthy doctor/lawyer couple as a live in nanny at their Santiago home just as they were having a baby. She worked there for seven years.  She lived in a small room behind a sliding door off the kitchen. Mara, the mother is neurotic and the father, Cristóbal is a mildly sadistic disciplinarian. The child, Julia, was obstinate and her parents blamed Estela for anything wrong with their child, whilst taking credit for all that was right. The couple take Estela for granted and frequently gaslight her. The family disfunction drives much of the tension in the novel, along with the question of how the girl drowned.

I kept thinking about the girl, … about her chubby, idle hands, always ready to pop those nails into her mouth, for them to be destroyed by her teeth. I never bit my nails. My mama didn’t either. I suppose for that you’d need to have your hands free.

The character of Estela is defined almost entirely by her role in the novel. We do not find out what she looks like, only what she does – cook, clean, make the beds, wash the clothes, look after the household and the child. Outside the house social, economic and political unrest are brewing as protests and public disturbances increase. Estela’s primary act of rebellion is to befriend a stray dog, take care of it and keep it secret from the other inhabitants of the house. Its discovery triggers the unfolding of the climatic events of the story.

This is just the way life goes: a drop, a drop, a drop, a drop, and then we ask ourselves, bewildered, how we’ve ended up soaked to the bone.

The treatment of Estela is a microcosm of the societal  dysfunction outside the house resulting from the imbalance of power between the wealthy and the poor in Chile. The story in Clean is a claustrophobic, slow moving car crash of the domestic lives of the inhabitants of the house. 

Book review: Elegy, Southwest by Madeline Watts

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Elegy, Southwest by Madeline Watts is set during the deadly 2018 Californian Camp Fires that burnt for weeks and destroyed a number of communities, leaving the state in a blanket of smoke. The relationship between Eloise and her husband Lewis flounders during a road trip. They are following the Colorado River across California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. 

Climate change isn’t like war, because you can’t see it happen… And it’s also incredibly slow until it’s incredibly fast.

Eloise is undertaking academic research on the river and its likely demise in the future due to climate change. Lewis who works for an art foundation is struggling with the death of his mother from cancer and smoking a lot of weed. He is inconsolable.  

I wanted to be across the literature. As though by studying the canon of death I would be able to anticipate the future… I was reading for you, for when you fell apart.

Eloise grapples with her husbands detachment as they drive across the desert. She decides to keep her suspicion she is pregnant from him as she feels him distancing from her. The story is told from the future when Eloise is sifting through events and searching for resolution after Lewis is gone. 

Afterwards, you told me it was part of what you loved most about those weeks.

The cover of Elegy, Southwest is beautiful. The story is a cinematic, meandering, slow burn about personal and environmental decay and the grief that accompanies those deteriorations.

Book review: The Night Ship by Jess Kidd

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Jess Kidd’s novel The Night Ship tells two stories set centuries apart – one in 1628 and the other 1989. It connects the lives of two motherless children via Beacon island off the coast of Western Australia. The story was inspired by the bizarre and disturbing 1628 shipwreck of the Batavia on her maiden voyage from Holland. The journey left 200 surviving passengers and crew stranded on the Houtman Abrolhos island chain. The stranding led to mutiny, the death of more than half of those survivors and enslavement of the rest. Only about 70 were till living when finally rescued three months later.

The greatest disgrace of humankind is the failure of the strong to protect the weak.

In Judd’s tale, Mayken, a bit of a wild child, and her nursemaid Imke, board a ship soon after the death of the girls mother. She is destined to live with her merchant father in Australia. While onboard Mayken undertakes as series of clandestine adventures throughout bowels of the ship dressed as a kitchen boy. It is on these adventures she discovers the mythical beast that lives in onboard – a kind of eel like creature called Bullebak. She is convinced the monster is responsible for the failing health of her beloved nursemaid and sets out to capture it. Conditions on the ship worsen, relationships deteriorate and there is mutiny in the air.

As is the way with souls confined, tempers fray and flare, ill-spoken words fester, coincidences become intrigues. Minds seethe with resentment and revenge like the worms in the water barrels. As the ship spoils, so does the air between the people.

In 1989, nine year old Gil Hurley is sent to the home off his uncommunicative fisherman grandfather, Joss, on Beacon island after the death of his mother. The island is said to be haunted by the spirit of a young girl. He also finds an old story book of his mother’s about a bunyip, an eel-like monster that preys on children. Gill does not want to be a fisherman and is isolated. He befriends a tortoise and becomes fascinated by the tale of the wreck of the Batavia. Monsters loom large for both children.

Gil knows the signs of haunting. A kid ghost will give you cold knees. A woman ghost turns silver jewellery black. If furniture’s thrown around, your ghost is a man. Gil’s knees are fine, thank you.” 

The Night Ship unfolds in alternate chapters linked by the children’s parallel experiences and monster representations of their fears. It is an atmospheric and melancholy coming of age story. The Night Ship explores grief, survival and human cruelty, but it’s not all grim. Kidd also injects humour, and as always, I love a bit of magical realism.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

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Psychological historical thriller, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, is a creepy, claustrophobic yet compelling tale set in 1960s rural Netherlands. 

That’s what happens when people die. They take themselves with them and you never ever find out anything new about them ever

Unmarried and almost 30, Isabel lives alone in the family home of her deceased parents in Overijssel. The house is willed to her older brother, Louis, upon marriage – making Isa’s habitation tenuous.

She belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her.

Isa is isolated and lonely and wound up like a spring. Her inner discomfort plays out through a desperate possessiveness of the house and its contents. She demands the maid, Neelke, keeps it in the way her mother liked it. She counts the spoons to ensure none go missing and accuses the maid when she can’t find things. Overall Isa is unlikable – a brittle, awkward and acerbic woman.

She was pretty in a way that men thought women ought to be pretty.

Louis is a man who falls in and out of love easily. When he turns up with Eva and installs her in their mother’s bedroom, Isa takes an immediate dislike to the women. She finds her grating and overly familiar. 

There isn’t a version of me that could’ve looked away from you.

Then Louis leaves the two women together and Isa’s anxieties escalate as Eva gets under her skin. But soon irritation turns into passion. To give more away would be a spoiler, suffice to say the third act focuses on Eva and has a brilliant twist.

She had held a pear in her hand and she had eaten it skin and all. She had eaten the stem and she had eaten its seeds and she had eaten its core, and the hunger still sat in her like an open maw. She thought: I can hold you and find that I still miss your body. She thought: I can listen to you speak and still miss the sound of your voice.

The Safekeep is a beautifully written story that delivers an emotionally resonant and complex read. But, in case you haven’t picked it up from the quotes, The Safekeep is also saucy. So if you can’t tolerate explicit sex scenes, it may not be for you. 

Book review: The Siren, the Song and the Spy by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

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Fantasy novel, The Siren, the Song and the Spy by Maggie Tokuda-Hall is the sequel to The Mermaid the Witch and the Sea. In The Siren, the Song and the Spy there are more characters, the stakes are higher, and the story bigger than the first book.

The Sea is forever destined to forget. And I am forever destined to remember.

The Sea worries about the continued hunting of mermaids for their blood, Alfie has been helping pirates stage a rebellion against the Empire, and the Empire has been quelling rebellions as fast as it can.

I don’t believe we can beat them. Not because we are not fierce enough, but because in order to win, we’d have to abandon everything that we are.

Meanwhile Genevieve washes up on the Red Shore of Wariuta. Koa who finds her decides to spare her life even though she had a crack at his and his sister, Kaia. Kaia doesn’t trust her. As Genevieve begins to discover things are not all as she believed in the Empire, she has to decide where her loyalties lie.

Let’s go make something of this world.

The Siren, the Song and the Spy is an action packed, emotionally complex and rich story told from multiple points of view. There is deep diversity in the characters, and the world building is impressive and large scale. Themes include colonialism, oppression, imperialism, resistance,racism, ableism, 

Book review: The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King

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History, magical pencils, memory, stories, computer science, family drama, identity, culture, and queer romance are all packed into Allison King’s debut, The Phoenix Pencil Company. Duel timelines and multiple narrators reveal a family sage full of secrets and betrayal. The story is told in an epistolary format via blog-journal entries (Monica Tsai) and letters written by Monica’s grandmother (Wong Yun) to her cousin (Meng).

Written words are incredible in this way—they take a whole idea and condense it down with the help of the writer’s mind. The writer pulls in only the important parts. Each word is efficient, each tells the reader something.

Monica Tsai, a computer engineering college student, leaves school to care for her aging grandparents who raised her. Her grandmother, Wong Yun, has developed Alzheimers. While caring for grandma, Monica works for her professor’s tech company on a program called EMBRS – online diary software.

if our stories will be lost, no matter how hard we try to preserve them, then the only thing that really matters is the people in our lives, and how we treat them in this moment in time.

While searching for a gift for her grandmother’s ninetieth birthday, Monica finds her grandmother’s cousin, Meng via a young woman called Louise Sun. Louise is a student studying memory at Princeton and has interviewed Meng. She has a gift from Meng for Wong – a pencil. The two young women connect.

I couldn’t reconcile the Taiwan I knew with the Taiwan that EMBRS was trying to show me, a history of martial law and terror, its citizens disappeared or mysteriously killed for protesting, or simply for attending one wrong gathering.

Monica discovers a secret kept by her grandmother. Wong was involved in running the Pheonix Pencil Company in 1930s Shanghai when she was young and can ‘reforge’ pencils. This is a process by which she can access all the content ever written by the pencil as they retain the memory of the words put to paper. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, which led to WWII then the Chinese civil war – the pencil forging was used to support espionage by the Chinese military.

We heard about the forced confessions of business owners, how everyone was once again paranoid, trying to sniff out any capitalist leanings among their neighbors.

The Phoenix Pencil Company was inspired by King’s grandparents who ran a pencil company in Shanghai. A genre-bending story with insight into Chinese history, data, and privacy. The novel also asks who owns our stories?

Book review: Things in Jars by Jess Kidd

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The Victorian era gothic crime fiction novel Things in Jars by Jess Kidd is a great read. Set in London, the atmosphere is vivid, there’s plenty of magical realism, and Kidd’s grasp of creative language is enviable as well as witty. 

London is awash with the freshly murdered. Bodies appear hourly, blooming in doorways with their throats cut, prone in alleyways with the head knocked in. Half-burnt in hearths and garroted in garrets, folded into trunks or bobbing about in the Thames, great bloated shoals of them.

Bridie Devine, former surgeons apprentice, is a pipe smoking detective. She has a dagger strapped to her thigh and sometimes cross dresses to gain access into male only spaces. She also sees things, ghosts mainly. She chats to them, in particular a recently deceased boxer called Ruby Doyle who has the hots for her. She is not interested, but still he stays as her protector.

The raven turns in her element and the world turns too, confirming what she already knew: she is the centre of everything.

Bridie takes on a case to find Sir Edmund Berwick’s missing child called Christabel. For some reason Sir Edmond has kept the child in hiding her whole life. It turns out Charitable is no ordinary child.

Sir Edmund’s home is an architectural grotesque, the ornate facade the unlikely union of a warship and a wedding cake. A riot of musket loops, carved shells, liquorice-twist chimneys, mock battlements, a first-floor prow, and an exuberance of portholes. On the carved stone pediment above the wide front door Neptune cavorts with sea nymphs. The lower-floor windows are festooned with theatrical swags of stone starfish and scallop shells. For all this, the house looks unlived in.

Things in Jars is a dark, strange, whimsical, and compelling novel. I’ll be reading more of Jess Kidd’s work – I’m hooked.