
Foster by Claire Keegan
A small girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm in rural Ireland, without knowing when she …
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A small girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm in rural Ireland, without knowing when she …
A band of clumsy Jordanian-Palestinian journalists wants to interview an old man, one of the last survivor of the 1948 Nakba living in Amman. The man refuses, and a farcical quest to obtain his story begins. It's a comedy of errors: funny, at times almost slapstic, but also deep, in the sense that the author is exploring the distance between generations, the process through which personal (traumatic) memories become collective history. While I very much enjoyed the political satire, there was a whole other level of excess / caricature that I did not really get. The four protagonists are all insufferable and ridiculous, in extremely gendered ways. The man are arrogant and constantly horny. The women are manipulative and fall neatly into the all-to-familiar madonna / whore dichotomy. What was going on with that?
In this age of aggressive queer-baiting and pink-washing, sometimes I hear that 'representation is important' and want to bang my head against the wall. Fuck representation. I really do not need a Disney princess to look like me, thank you very much. Then I come across a book like this, clearly written by a queer person for queer people because of a genuine desire to share, and I calm down. Because it is of course important to feel not-alone.
What can I say, I love A.K. Summers, I want her to be my friend and build shelves together. She is an old-style butch lady, part of an identity group that is almost disappearing. She knows it and mourns it in the book, at times perhaps coming a bit close to a 'why does gender have to be so complicated' stance, or at least a 'youth these days' stance, but she …
In this age of aggressive queer-baiting and pink-washing, sometimes I hear that 'representation is important' and want to bang my head against the wall. Fuck representation. I really do not need a Disney princess to look like me, thank you very much. Then I come across a book like this, clearly written by a queer person for queer people because of a genuine desire to share, and I calm down. Because it is of course important to feel not-alone.
What can I say, I love A.K. Summers, I want her to be my friend and build shelves together. She is an old-style butch lady, part of an identity group that is almost disappearing. She knows it and mourns it in the book, at times perhaps coming a bit close to a 'why does gender have to be so complicated' stance, or at least a 'youth these days' stance, but she is saved but what seems like an honest sense of curiosity and openness to try and learn why fewer younger people feel able or willing to identify as masculine women, a desire I see expressed through the list of reading recommendations at the end of the book.
I also love the book's graphic style. It really has the vibe of a DIY internet strip, seeming rough and ready compared to the many recent graphic novels where every single frame could become a picture to hang on the wall, and every detail is carefully thought through.
Butch pregnancy sounds tough, but in the way many things in many lives are tough. A.K. Summers if freaked out by her body, feels lonely, is in pain, doesn't feel up to the task - all things that are surely related to her gender identity but also probably quite common, if unspoken, experiences for pregnant people? In one of the last spreads, she's giving birth and imagines herself on a jumping board, realising that whether she jumps or not, she's going fall: she no longer needs to feel she won't be able to do it, because she's in the middle of it and there is no stopping it.
Content warning Minor spoilers!
Could I describe this book as an explicitly Dickensian novella without sounding like a pretentious twat? Probably no. The protagonist is a very good man, Billy, whose desire to 'not cast the first stone' and 'do to others what you would have them do to you' is fundamentally at odds with the norms of the Catholic Church and the deprived village community that abides by them. Just a few days before Christmas, he finds himself visiting the local Magdalene house, and losing the ability to ignore it [why had he been able to look away until that moment? likely, he had been understandably focused on his own survival]. Will he do the right thing? Reader, you can guess. Is it annoying to have an almost flawless male hero surrounded by women in distress? For me, the setup was saved by the fact that Billy is explicitly trying to pay forward the kindness of his own benefactor, Mrs Wilson. Mrs Wilson was a wealthy woman, and Billy is a man who is better off than most of his peers, because, believably, a little privilege helps when you're fighting evil nuns.
In other hands, this could have been a really sappy and moralistic story. I'm actually amazed that it is not.
Content warning Medium spoilers!
Voyage in the dark is the fairly autobiographical account of how Anna, a 19 year old white girl from the Caribbean, navigates her life in England. As a woman of modest means, the choices at her disposal are limited. Since she doesn’t want to spend her whole life working some soul-destroying job while living in near-misery, she can either offer herself to wealthier men in exchange for favours and money, or she can marry, entering a similar deal but with only one man.
Or maybe even that is not entirely a choice, because by the time we encounter her she’s already not really marriage material, at least not for men who can afford the luxuries to which she aspires: fun nights out, nice clothes, a beautiful and warm apartment. So, when she meets Walter, who is gentlemanly and affectionate towards her, but clearly has no serious intentions, she is in. She doesn’t really fall in love with him, but does become enamored with his attentions and the time they spent together so that, when he gets bored, she unravels and, we would now say, engages in self-destructive behaviors, fueled by a depression that remains unnamed. Throughout her voyage in the dark, Anna remembers moments of her life in the Caribbean, where it wasn’t so cold, colours were blighter and her family had power. Anna longs to be back and longs to be black; she idealizes and exoticizes the hell out of the nanny who took care of her as a child, but fully realizes that there was no love there, and that she does not really belonged there any more that she does in England.
Anna (Jean?) is no heroine: she’s damaged, unlikable and self-sabotages at every corner. She is fiercely independent, but cannot help pining after men, for both the romance and money they can offer. She can see through the hypocrisy of British society, its classism and racism, its moralism – but is fundamentally preoccupied by how they affect herself, has no bandwidth to look beyond that. How very honest and believable. How tragic.
Beautiful writing, sparing and precise, with a lot of meaning conveyed through details: the patterns of the wall paper, the prints hanging from the wall, or the shoes people wear. Take this passage: The cinema smelt of poor people, and on the screen ladies and gentlemen in evening dress walked about with strained smiles. 'There! ' Ethel said, nudging. 'D' you see that girl - the one with the band round her hair? That' s the one I know; that' s my friend. Do you see? My God, isn' t she terrible? My God, what a scream! ' 'Oh, shut up, ' somebody said. 'Shut up yourself, ' Ethel said. I opened my eyes. On the screen a pretty girl was pointing a revolver at a group of guests. They backed away with their arms held high above their heads and expressions of terror on their faces. The pretty girl's lips moved. The fat hostess unclasped a necklace of huge pearls and fell, fainting, into the arms of a footman. The pretty girl, holding the revolver so that the audience could see that two of her fingers were missing, walked backwards towards the door. Her lips moved again. You could see what she was saying. 'Keep'em up . . . . ' When the police appeared everybody clapped. When Three-Fingered Kate was caught everybody clapped louder still. 'Damned fools, ' I said. 'Aren' t they damned fools? Don't you hate them? They always clap in the wrong places and laugh in the wrong places.'
@renata also you gave 2 stars to Judith, so it's all relative!
@renata It's fine :) especially since I know sometimes you're also spontaneously generous and give five-star ratings (e.g. to films)...
This book is pretty unique, I'll give it that. I did love the language, which is poetic and raw, queer in the best kind of way. Even though it is generally not my style, I also enjoyed being carried through this journey, sentence after sentence, without the need to fully understand every sentence, of knowing what happens at which point in the story, where a character comes from and how they end up.
Is Eileen incredibly pretentious when it comes to poetry? Hell yes. Is it yet another book by a writer enamored with the myth of their own creative bubble, and very proud of having hung out with the right crowds, doing drugs and having sex in New York? Also yes. Does Eileen, who strike me as a really sweet person, come across as a touch navel-gazing and emotionally unavailable (with one exception, Rosie the dog, that was adorable)? …
This book is pretty unique, I'll give it that. I did love the language, which is poetic and raw, queer in the best kind of way. Even though it is generally not my style, I also enjoyed being carried through this journey, sentence after sentence, without the need to fully understand every sentence, of knowing what happens at which point in the story, where a character comes from and how they end up.
Is Eileen incredibly pretentious when it comes to poetry? Hell yes. Is it yet another book by a writer enamored with the myth of their own creative bubble, and very proud of having hung out with the right crowds, doing drugs and having sex in New York? Also yes. Does Eileen, who strike me as a really sweet person, come across as a touch navel-gazing and emotionally unavailable (with one exception, Rosie the dog, that was adorable)? Absolutely. Do they seem to have a sense of humour about it? To be fair, yes they do.
The word matrescence makes me think of a growing appendage, a bulbous tentacle shooting off from someone’s side. It is however, a -scence as in adolescence, not excrescence: a phase of change in a person’s life. The book’s story is that becoming a mother is a tremendous change, physically, psychologically and socially, and not enough fuss is made about. Maybe this is because of a collective effort to undervalue women’s contributions, skills and sufferings, maybe because of a paternalistic sense that not talking about the most gruesome and taxing aspects of motherhoods will mean more women sign up for it. So far, so good.
The book waves together accounts of scientific research on the topic, some literature-informed reflections on the social structures of motherhood, bits of her personal experience as a mother of three, and sketches of motherhood in the animal kingdom. I enjoyed these different ingredients to different degrees. …
The word matrescence makes me think of a growing appendage, a bulbous tentacle shooting off from someone’s side. It is however, a -scence as in adolescence, not excrescence: a phase of change in a person’s life. The book’s story is that becoming a mother is a tremendous change, physically, psychologically and socially, and not enough fuss is made about. Maybe this is because of a collective effort to undervalue women’s contributions, skills and sufferings, maybe because of a paternalistic sense that not talking about the most gruesome and taxing aspects of motherhoods will mean more women sign up for it. So far, so good.
The book waves together accounts of scientific research on the topic, some literature-informed reflections on the social structures of motherhood, bits of her personal experience as a mother of three, and sketches of motherhood in the animal kingdom. I enjoyed these different ingredients to different degrees. The author is a science journalist, meaning she’s pretty good at explaining biological research, but I did wish for more depth and details: just when things were becoming interesting, she would move on to a different topic. I may be a harsh critique on the social science front, but these pages felt too superficial, and maybe like she did her homework but didn’t have anything original to say about them. Her personal experience sections were…a roller coaster. Depending on the topic, I alternative thought that she was able to articulate my own fears, that she is a straight lady and god have mercy on them, or that she was genuinely in need of help and should be urgently talking to a counselor (a personal one, but also a marriage one!) rather than writing a book.
This sounds like a mean review, and I don’t mean it. Motherhood does sound tough and it is certainly good that someone writes about this. Plus, I’m sorry, Lucy Jones, that you had to go through all of this.
I read this book years ago and, if you had asked me, I would have said it's a book about Kay's experience growing up black in Scotland, and then embarking on a quest to trace her birth parents. I suppose this is more or less what the official blurb suggests. On this second read, I found that these two threads are kind of secondary, and the book could instead be described as an exploration of what it means to be a daughter. Kay loves her adoptive parents to bits, and that love really shapes her memory of the past (the way they stood up for her in every way they could), her experience of the present (her conflicting emotions meeting her birth parents and coming to terms with how insubstantial a relation based on genetics is), and her outlook on the future (as she sees herself taking on more and …
I read this book years ago and, if you had asked me, I would have said it's a book about Kay's experience growing up black in Scotland, and then embarking on a quest to trace her birth parents. I suppose this is more or less what the official blurb suggests. On this second read, I found that these two threads are kind of secondary, and the book could instead be described as an exploration of what it means to be a daughter. Kay loves her adoptive parents to bits, and that love really shapes her memory of the past (the way they stood up for her in every way they could), her experience of the present (her conflicting emotions meeting her birth parents and coming to terms with how insubstantial a relation based on genetics is), and her outlook on the future (as she sees herself taking on more and more of a caring role in relation to her aging mum and dad). In many ways, the book is not particular complex in its plot, language or insights, but it just gives one a warm feeling, and Kay seems so fucking lovely!
Content warning Very minor spoilers
A basic man - not a particularly bad one, but the bar is low - is clearly struggling, as we soon start to suspect, because of a recent break-up. He is miserable, and resentful. As more details about his late relationship emerge, it becomes clear he was kind of an asshole, and, although on some level he knows is and is ready to acknowledge it, he doesn't see much of a problem with that either. As this synopsis makes clear, not much happen in the book. Nor is there a lot of perceptive introspection, because our protagonist is not able of that. Yet, I found it surprisingly not-boring: a convincing sketch of masculine mediocrity.
Content warning Mega spoiler!!!
Let’s get the spoilers out of the way first (LAST WARNING, STOP READING!): It is the 1960s, in the Netherlands. Isabel grew up in a large country house in Overijssel, living a reclusive, calm, and quite miserable life. Over the years, she has seen her brothers move out, and her mother die, and feels utterly alone. She is unfriendly, bitter and obsessed by the fear others may be stealing from her. Against her will, she ends up hosting Eva, the new girlfriend of her brother Louis. Eva appears to Isabel as working-class, loud, tacky and fake. Things start to disappear from the house: first a spoon, then a cup, then a plate. The two barely talk to one another, and when they do Isabel is ferocious. Time goes on, however and, when you put two women alone in an isolate, cold country house for long enough, they will find ways to warm up each other, at first through guilt-ridden kisses in dark hallways, eventually with steaming hot sex. The twist is revealed in the third part of the book, when we get to read, through Isabel’s eyes, Eva’s diary. We learn that the house used to belong to Eva’s family, who lost it during the war when they had to go into hiding on account of being Jewish. They also lost the legal rights to the house, since they stopped paying the mortgage. Eva’s appearance in Louis and Isabel’s lives is an elaborate plan to get back what it’s hers. So far, so intriguing. In the last chapter, Eva and Isabel make up and EVA MOVES IN WITH ISABEL AS HER LOVER WITH THE PROMISE THAT SHE WILL BE GIVEN THE HOUSE WHEN ISABEL INHERITS IT, WHICH IS AS PROBLEMATIC AS STARTING POINT FOR A RELATIONSHIP AS THERE EVER WAS. This book has two enormous strengths: (1) it’s fun to read, thanks to a well-paced plot, a writing style that is elegant enough without being pretentious, and a lot of really hot lesbian sex scenes (2) it explores an important topic, e.g. collective responsibility, guilt and victimhood, in a way that is thought-provoking but not excessively preachy. This book also has a pretty big flaw, i.e. a disappointing ending that to my eyes undermines both endeavors, since if seems implausible in relation to the preceding story line, and also risks presenting love as a solution to historical injustice. The book came out in 2024 and, as far as I hear, the author has basically refused to talk about Palestine, and seems to be resisting the pressure">pagesofjulia.com/2024/02/16/maximum-shelf-author-interview-yael-van-der-wouden/) to do so on the grounds that it has little to do with a Jewish-Dutch identity (maybe? That’s how I understand it). The argument is complicated by the fact that she was born in Israel and the story of Eva is not too dissimilar to that of many Palestinians, at least with respect to the experience of losing a home to strangers.
Four British women, each miserable in her own way, rent an Italian castle together. They don't know each other, don't particularly like each other, and are only motivated by the desire to leave behind the rain and their husbands / suitors. Ms Wilkins is a young housewife, married to a stingy man, who often loses the thread and cannot filter her thoughts. Ms Arbuthnot is a religious woman who feels abandoned by her husband, and seeks refuge in her pious work. Lady Caroline is a young aristocrat, so beautiful that men cannot help fall in love, to her great frustration. Mrs. Fisher is an elderly woman who lives stuck in her memories, preferring the company of dead intellectuals and politicians she met in the past to that of any living person. The Italian sun transforms all of them, but the undeniable cheesiness is only kept at bay by the author's …
Four British women, each miserable in her own way, rent an Italian castle together. They don't know each other, don't particularly like each other, and are only motivated by the desire to leave behind the rain and their husbands / suitors. Ms Wilkins is a young housewife, married to a stingy man, who often loses the thread and cannot filter her thoughts. Ms Arbuthnot is a religious woman who feels abandoned by her husband, and seeks refuge in her pious work. Lady Caroline is a young aristocrat, so beautiful that men cannot help fall in love, to her great frustration. Mrs. Fisher is an elderly woman who lives stuck in her memories, preferring the company of dead intellectuals and politicians she met in the past to that of any living person. The Italian sun transforms all of them, but the undeniable cheesiness is only kept at bay by the author's light sarcasm and humor.