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valecrrr@supernormalreads.nl

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ralentina's books

Omar Khalifah, Barbara Romaine: Sand-Catcher (2024, Coffee House Press) 4 stars

Palestine was lost

4 stars

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?

reviewed Pregnant butch by A. K. Summers

A. K. Summers: Pregnant butch (2014, Soft Skull Press, an imprint of Counterpoint) 5 stars

First pregnancy can be a fraught, uncomfortable experience for any woman, but for resolutely butch …

A very butch graphic memoir

4 stars

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 …

Claire Keegan: Small Things Like These (2022, Faber & Faber, Limited) 4 stars

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, …

Glad I read it before watching the film

4 stars

Content warning Minor spoilers!

reviewed Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys: Voyage in the Dark 4 stars

Voyage in the Dark was written in 1934 by Jean Rhys. It tells of the …

Don't you hate them? They always clap in the wrong places and laugh in the wrong places.'

4 stars

Content warning Medium spoilers!

Eileen Myles: Inferno (Paperback, 2010, OR Books) 4 stars

Punk poet sensation Myles' semi-autobiographical novel.

From its beginning—“My English professor’s ass was so beautiful.”—to …

Eileen, the punk rascal

4 stars

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)? …

Lucy Jones: Matrescence (2024, Penguin Books, Limited) 3 stars

During pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood, women undergo a far-reaching physiological, psychological and social metamorphosis. …

A very lonely experience of motherhood. Thrice.

3 stars

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. …

reviewed Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay

Jackie Kay: Red Dust Road (Paperback, 2017, Picador, Pan Macmillan UK) 4 stars

From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a …

I want to have tea with Jackie Kay

4 stars

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 …

Claire Keegan: So Late in the Day (2023, Faber & Faber, Limited) 4 stars

'A genuine once-in-a-generation writer.' The Times 'Every word is the right word in the right …

A convincing sketch of masculine mediocrity

4 stars

Content warning Very minor spoilers

Yael van der Wouden: The Safekeep (Hardcover, 2024, Viking) 4 stars

An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge …

Rarely has an ending ruined my reading pleasure to this extent

4 stars

Content warning Mega spoiler!!!

Elizabeth von Arnim: The Enchanted April (2023, Standard Ebooks) 4 stars

Four strangers, each enchanted by an advertisement addressed “To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine,” …

An interwar Eat Pray Love

4 stars

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 …