Hello dear readers,
I hope this damp February is treating you well. Gosh wasn’t January long? And it already feels like such a long time ago too. I’ve dredged from my memory the six books I read in the first month of the year.
There’s some gloomy environmentalism, a book club’s dream, and a swash-buckling adventure. Let’s dive in!
One. How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
I really wanted to like this novel. It’s set in an unnamed African country, and follows the inhabitants of a village that is slowly being poisoned by a nearby oil well. It’s run by an American company and it benefits only the corrupt regime running the nation, not the local people. There aren’t enough novels about topics like this, or at least they don’t get promoted in the UK if they exist. Unfortunately I found the pace of this so plodding, and the narrative voice so dull that I can’t recommend it. The lack of hope was also stifling to read. I think in more skilled hands it would have been more rousing, but this just left me feeling glum.
How I read it: At home as the year began
Two. A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning-Wroe
This is a book club’s dream - there’s so much to dig into, but I can’t decide whether it was actually good or not. It follows a newly qualified embalmer who answers the call for volunteers at Aberfan after a terrible mining disaster which killed dozens of children. It’s a real event, and I felt a bit queasy about its use in this novel. For me it felt cheap, and almost like a convenient way of moving the character along, rather than it being truly earned. The story is told very straight, with no bells and whistles, which was quite disarming in a way. The dialogue was truly awful in places though. In short, I am conflicted!
How I read it: Snuggled on my sofa
Three. I'm glad my mom died by Jennette McCurdy
This is a truly shocking, as well as very funny in places, memoir from a former child star. McCurdy was forced into acting by her mother, who had never been able to follow her own dreams of stardom. What follows is a horrifying portrayal of an industry that looks the other way while its talent is used and abused, not only by the system but in McCurdy’s case, also by her own mother. As she gives away in the title, her mum died a few years ago, and it’s only since then that she’s been able to pick away at the layers of deceit and conditioning she had grown up under. A really harrowing read in places, it does make you wonder how any child stars make it to be vaguely well-adjusted people. Maybe they don’t?
How I read it: Very quickly, almost in one nap time
Four. Divine Might by Natalie Haynes
Haynes is a stand up comedian, author, and lover of the classics. This is her exploration of different goddesses of greek myth. She’s so good at using her scholarly skills while keeping the tone very accessible to people like me who have never studied classics. Her central idea is that we create gods we resemble, which is why greek gods are so horrible to each other (and their human subjects) all the time. The only weird thing for me is that she does often talk about them as if they were real? But as a device it is helpful for getting to know their different foibles - of which they have a lot.
How I read it: A goddess a night for a week or so
Five. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
Never has the word swash-buckling been more appropriate then when describing this novel about a retired female pirate, brought back to the seas by the promise of unimaginable riches. She gets a lot more than she bargained for as she fights monsters both real and fantastical. It’s such a fun read, and there’s something for everyone in here, even for working mums, as our piratical hero grapples with wanting to do the thing she loves while being away from her beloved daughter. Chakraborty also very skilfully sets up the sequel, which I will definitely be reading.
How I read it: Adventuring in the evenings from my sofa
Six. The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight
This is such a weird book. It’s a non fiction account of the titular premonitions bureau, set up by a journalist from the Evening Standard and a psychiatrist who wanted to test whether humans really could see the future. And if they did, could you set up an elite group of them to foresee terrible events and stop them before they happened? Coincidentally the Aberfan mining disaster is also the catalyst for the events in this book, as hundreds of people respond to a call for premonitions about the event and say that they had a psychic vision of some sort about it. They didn’t predict it, most of the premonitions are not specific enough to say that, often they’re a terrible feeling, or a vision of a blackness, or a plane falling from the sky in an unknown location. It’s a fascinating topic and I thought Knight’s style was so arresting. Occasionally I would get stopped in my tracks by a beautiful turn of phrase. This is his first book so I look forward to seeing what he explores next.
How I read it: At bedtime, but I didn’t have any prophetic dreams (that I know about yet)
Book of the month: for the joy and the pirates, it’s got to be The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi.
That’s it from me for January, I’ll be in touch soon with February’s reads!