I’m now getting on nicely with my 20 Books of Summer 2024 project! Cathy from 746 Books has been running 20 Books of Summer since 2014, and I’ve been taking part since 2015 (see all my lists and links here). Of the eleven print books I acquired in December 2023 before Christmas, I’ve now read and reviewed two, but that’s hardly surprising as they’re so recent. I heard about this author on Life of a Female Bibliophile’s blog. This also covers one of my 2024 TBR project reads.
Taj McCoy – “Savvy Sheldon Feels Good as Hell”
(11 December 2023, The Works)
A really nicely done novel: our heroine, Savannah, has a tough mum who badgers her to seek promotion and better herself; her Thai and Black dual heritage gives her unusual looks plus a stereotypically pushy first-generation immigrant mum who is constantly telling her to work harder towards her promotion, both of which her boyfriend certainly doesn’t appreciate as he digs at her to lose weight and change herself as well as concentrating more on him than her job, or he’ll be looking for an upgrade.
Fortunately, Savvy sets up her own upgrade plan which involves eating more healthily and doing more exercise, both cardio with tennis and work for the mind and spirit with yoga. Her friends are her main support, and when she meets a new guy, instead of abandoning them for him, she brings him into the friendship group and has them check him out and then absorb him – her other friends do the same. There’s LGBTQIA representation with one of Savvy’s two best friends, and an emphasis on following your dreams through making connections with others and doing things sensibly rather than full tilt which made it wholesome in the way I like things wholesome (diversity and sensibleness, it seems) while including great descriptions of tennis games and high-end cooking to give it more depth than just a modern romance novel (there are a couple of rude bits too but nothing too much).
A good read and I’m looking forward to the other one by this author I have TBR.
I spotted this one on NetGalley and couldn’t resist it when I saw the opening line of the blurb: “Birmingham, 2024”. That was me, a gonner. I’m so glad I did request it, as it was BRILLIANT! I’ve saved my review for this evening as I’ve been to an event for it at The Heath Bookshop, great timing, I know!
PJ Ellis – “We Could Be Heroes”
(26 April 2024, NetGalley).
[He] insisted on driving him across town to confront [him] there and then. It all felt very empowering and get-uup-and-go until they ended up getting caught in traffic on Digbeth High Street becaue they forgot that half the city was in a perpetual state of being dug up and repaved.
First of all, and what a relief: this book gets Birmingham right. It gets my adopted home city down to a t, and I’m really, really fussy about books set here. I laughed out loud and read bits out to Matthew as a group of fabulous drag queens discuss never going to the nightclub Snobs because it’s not Old Snobs so it’s not the same, and little comments about the city are woven through the book, making a charming novel (yes, there’s a fair bit of sex in it, but it’s still charming) even more so.
So, we have a film star so far in the closet he’s got an automatic expression his face just makes by itself when he’s photographed with a female “love interest” and whose only friends seem to be his agent and the star and stunt doubles he’s working with, who encounters Will, part-time bookshop assistant, part-time drag queen, so unmistakeably gay he was told he was before he knew it himself, and with all the worries and dangers that involves, which are not played down. There’s an acknowledgement there also of the anti-femme sentiment that runs rife through gay male life, not accepted here, with Will and his best friend Jordan out and proud and unashamed.
There’s a dual timeline plot here with the writers of the superhero comic series whose film Patrick is making in a marriage of convenience in 1949, with a repressive atmosphere worrying them, each with a lover of their own gender, trying to create a character who reflects some aspects of their own lives; this is touchingly done and also cleverly written to reflect the language of the time, so quite different from the modern touches. W
Will and Jordan’s fellow drag queens are wonderful and hilarious and Will’s found family touching and lovely – there’s his not-really-a-sister-at-all who helped bring him up, their agender kid and his Black, superhero-obsessed fanfic writer colleague, April. The story is fun but also tender and the subplot about the threat to both their venue, The Village, and the Drag Queen Story Time they run in the Central Library adds an authentic and serious side that goes along with the comments of how women’s bodies are policed and how sexuality is controlled.
So yes, it’s a romcom, yes, there are misunderstandings and outfits and crying on sofas, but it’s more than that, a rounded and super book I thoroughly enjoyed.
Another thing I thoroughly enjoyed was the session at The Heath Bookshop this evening – Mr Ellis was a delightful chap and the session informal and fun – and I of course bought his first book, “Love and Other Scams”!
Thank you to HarperNorth for accepting me to read this novel via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “We Could be Heroes” was published on 6 June 2024.
Another read from my 20 Books of Summer 2024 project! Cathy from 746 Books has been running 20 Books of Summer since 2014, and I’ve been taking part since 2015 (see all my lists and links here). I received this one as a gift from Matthew who bought it at the San Diego Public Library library sale on a work trip: when questioned, he said he liked the title and the cover, which is fair enough. Out of the nine books I acquired in March 2023, I’ve read and reviewed all of them apart from the two Three Investigators books in Spanish, which represent more of a pipe-dream than an actual reading plan. This of course also accounts for one of my 2024 TBR project reads.
Alice Mattison – “The Book Borrower”
(6 March 2023, from Matthew)
I know you love me. But all the same, sometimes I’m at the lowr limit of what you can stand. (p. 146)
First off, there’s one book that’s borrowed, by one person, and in this experimental and I’d say literary fiction work, we get to read a lot of the book that was borrowed, interspersed with real (fictional) life, to quite surprising effect at the beginning when one of two central characters reads sentences from it while pushing her baby in his pram and, indeed, dropping him out of his pram (he’s OK, as are any dogs we become attached to).
The novel is about a long and somewhat fraught at times friendship between two women who meet in a New York City playground, and we follow their lives over two decades, some episodes almost repeating, and the subject of the book oddly reappearing in different places in their lives.
It’s made a bit odd by the incursions of this other book, but is certainly readable; there’s also something a bit shocking which disrupts it. I’d not heard of this author before, although she appears to have written a few novels, and would read something else by her.
Well-chosen, Matthew, both as a gift and as a 20Books title (I’m almost back on track now as I had a slow work day last week and managed to read this in one day!).
A Bookish Beck Serendipity moment: in this and “Northern Boy“, the central character in a scene complains of the coldness of the house they’re visiting.
Because I’ve read quite a lot this month and I haven’t got a huge amount to say about these novels, I’ve decided to do a joint post for three of them. Of the others, I’ve reviewed “Systemic” separately already, you will read reviews of “We Could be Heroes” and “In All Weathers” in the fullness of time, and I didn’t fully read “The Lonely Hearts Quiz League” as I wasn’t keen on the characters.
Rachel Barnett – “Escape to the French Chateau”
(09 May 2024, NetGalley)
Fran is a secret shopper for a big brand hotel chain, set up in that role after a mysterious event after her mum dies, but when she arrives at the chateau and is mistaken for a new staff member she runs with it. Johnny is there on holiday with his brother Noel and two of their staff members: they run a wine company but Johnny’s getting sick of Noel’s ways as he struggles through the end of his marriage. Of course they meet and make friends, and then Johnny finds a crumbling chateau he falls in love with and Fran finds a stray cat SHE falls in love with and suddenly things get more complicated (there is much peril for the cat but he is OK and that is a spoiler but I know you’ll want to know that). A nice holiday read with the usual amount of frustrating non-communication but nice, positive characters with mostly believable back-stories and reactions.
Thank you to Embla Books for offering me a review copy of this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “Escape to the French Chateau” was published on 12 June 2024.
Tawseef Khan – “Determination”
(19 April 2024, NetGalley)
I spotted this one in a NetGalley email, I think, and was intrigued by the premise of a book set in the offices of an immigration lawyer in Manchester. The second generation to run the company, Jamila Shah is exhausted but keeps on working, her ramshackle office and appearance testament to the thankless task she has. We meet her staff and clients, switching viewpoints to read their stories, returning to Jamila as she tries to carve out some kind of life and even date a bit. The details of the increased Hostile Environment and the struggles of the clients to get a determination on their case (hence the title) is fascinating, the writing unfortunately letting the book down slightly, with some clunky metaphors and a not hugely believable female central character. Khan is a qualified immigration solicitor with a doctorate on the British asylum system, and I personally would have preferred a non-fiction collective biography or memoir rather than a novelisation that didn’t always work. Worth reading for the portrayal of the situation in the UK, though.
Thank you to Footnote Press for selecting me to read this book in return for an honest review. “Determination” was published on 13 June 2024.
Iqbal Hussain – “Northern Boy”
(25 March 2024, NetGalley)
“You’ve done well, mate. You were right to ignore me. We just didn’t know how it would work out. No one from our background did what you did, so we had nothing to go on. We didn’t want you wasting your time. Anyway, you proved us wrong. We’re all dead proud of you. Even me”. He gets me in a headlock and pretends to wrestle me.
Rather frustratingly, this book showed a publication date of June on NetGalley when I downloaded it, this then changed when I was setting up my TBR and now it’s changed again to January 2025 … but I’m pretty sure the book is out and I’ve read it so here we go.
We meet Rafi, successful in his musical theatre career and settled with his long-term boyfriend, setting off from Australia to return to Blackburn for his best friend Shazia’s wedding. He hasn’t been back since his father’s funeral five years previously, and it was another five years back that he left the restrictive atmosphere of the UK after university. He comes across in the modern-day sections as not that likeable (but he gets to grow and change) and in flashbacks to his childhood as alternately smothered and pampered and encouraged to express his dramatic and artistic personality by his equally dramatic and artisitic mum and berated for being his true self, bullied at school and by the local aunties and his own brother. The two narratives converge and then we jump forward in time again for the resolution, nicely done and affecting.
I loved all the little details, creating costumes with Shazia, the women’s changing roles, especially his bete-noir at primary school, changing attitudes to gay people while the community becomes more visibly Muslim, the tapes his mum sends back to Pakistan with all the family news. Very excitingly, the text mentions the Three Investigators Mysteries when talking about Rafi and Shazia’s walkie-talkies! I also loved that Hussain mentions his association with Megaphone in the acknowledgements, a local community organisation that gives mentorship to writers of colour.
Thank you to Unbound for selecting me to read this book on NetGalley in return for an honest review.
Hooray, we have another book from my 20 Books of Summer 2024 project! Cathy from 746 Books has been running 20 Books of Summer since 2014, and I’ve been taking part since 2015 (see all my lists and links here). Matthew picked my list AND its order, so I obediently picked this up second. It dates back to January 2022, when Gill gave it to me for my birthday, choosing kindly from my wish list. Out of the 14 books I received then, I have now read and reviewed 10, with another of them appearing at the very end of my 20 Books (hopefully!). This of course also accounts for one of my 2024 TBR project reads.
Helen Taylor – “Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives”
(23 January 2022, from Gill)
I have been moved by the different ways the simple pracice of reading resonates in daily and larger life narratives. Reading lives cross over with and complement our real lives, each giving substance and depth to the other. Women have described to me their lifelong passion for novels and short stories, their gratitue to those who taught them to read, and nostagia for earliest childhood books. They’ve named writers and books that have comforted, challenged, and transformed them. (p. 225)
Taylor is an educator who has spent her working life talking about books and directing events at and whole literature festivals, so she knows what she’s talking about and she’s both done secondary research and sent out a questionnaire which she admits is non-scientific but has given her all sorts of information on why, how and what women read, where they read it and who they read it with, including looking at women writers and their relationship to books and their own readers.
Taylor makes a valient effort to make sure she acknowledges race as well as gender issues, discussing the research done on what she refers to as BAME characters in books, workers in publishing and attendees / speakers at festivals (shows how things have moved on since 2019 in terminology terms).
Nice little personal points were a mention of childhood visits to Selly Oak library, not far from me and my local library when I was a student, and mentions of two of my clients in her secondary research. There’s also a picture of the (old) Persephone Bookshop (this book was published in 2019) and one of the short section on writers and commentators was sadly on Dovegreyreader, the beloved blogger who suddenly stopped blogging.
I kept thinking as I went along that the connection Taylor was making to women talking about their own life stories as connected to their reading was stretching things a bit, but then I realised that a) I have strong memories myself of reading particular books in particular places (James’ The Golden Bowl in Tunisia; Seth’s A Suitable Boy in the South of France; Murdoch’s The Philosopher’s Pupil in the reception of a hammam in Turkey) and how I set such store by the way Emma’s and my Reading Together pulls the strands of our lives closer together and has set us visiting locations in our books, not forgetting the effect reading Iris Murdoch early and often has had on my personal, psychological and semi-academic lives. So there’s that.
An interesting and passionate book paying tribute to women as readers.
Although I’ve read a few race-based social justice books which include health inequality narratives and statistics, and a couple of books on women’s health which include racial inequality information, this is the first book I’ve encountered which is entirely about the racism endemic in societies around the world and the effects that has at grass-roots level.
Layal Liverpool – “Systemic: How Racism is Making Us Ill”
(2 Febrary 2024, NetGalley)
If there is a single message that I want this book to convey, it is one of hope: that the health gaps which we have been examining throughout these pages aren’t inevitable. Recognising that it is racism, rather than race, which is the most singnificant contributor to racial and ethnic health inequities globablly means we are acknowledging that change is possible.
Taking a truly global perspective, looking at personal narratives and data (where the latter exist, one theme of the book, demonstrating that many countries don’t keep adequate statistics) to show how systemic racism, from policy-makers to healthcare providers in the field, affects a whole range of health areas for global majority people, from pregnancy and birth to cancer diagnosis and treatment, Covid inequities, genome sequencing and research in general.
The author is a science journalist and obviously has a clear understanding of the field and how to interpret research. She is honest that she’s not able to cover all the intersectionalities, concerning herself mainly with race, although gender obviously comes in when talking about pregnancy and birth, and also when discussing the different presentations of heart attacks in male and female patients as it crosses over with Black and Brown people being less likely to be believed by White health professionals. Layal also includes lots of data and studies on Indigenous people, who are often left out of racial justice narratives.
There’s a lot of shocking information, of course, particularly, I felt, the ancient hangovers from older now disproved research making claims about bodily differences on racial lines and outdated adjustments to measures of disease which mark out unwell people as healthy. Layal does a super job of bring all this to the audience in approachable language, with lots of real-life examples from people’s own experiences. I hope this will be read widely.
Thank you to Bloomsbury Publishing for selecting me to read this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “Systemic” was published on 6 June 2024.
Cathy from 746 Books has been running 20 Books of Summer since 2014, and I’ve been taking part since 2015 (see all my lists and links here). And this is my first book finished (don’t worry, I’ve nearly completed the next one, too!). I acquired this from Ali in April 2023, and of the eight print books I gained then, I have now read and reviewed five, seem to have discarded two and have one on my Liz And Emma Reading Pile. Not bad going! This of course also accounts for one of my 2024 TBR project reads.
Ruth Ozeki – “The Book of Form and Emptiness”
(08 April 2023, from Ali)
You think he’s this crazy old hobo, but he’s not. He’s a poet. And a philospher. And a teacher. And it’s not him that’s crazy, Benny Oh. It’s the fucking world we live in. It’s capitalism that’s crazy. It’s neoliberalism, and materialism, and our fucked-up consumer culture that’s crazy. It’s the fucking meritocracy that tells you that feeling sad is wrong and it’s your fault if you’re broken, but hey, capitalims can fix you! Just take these miracle pills and go shoping and buy yourself some new shit!” (p. 365)
It took me a little while to get into this book, though I’m not sure why: I might have been a bit put off by having the longest book in the pile chosen for my first read!
It’s a lovely coming-of-age tale of Benny Oh and his mum Annabelle, in the months after his father dies and he starts hearing objects speaking to him, just as mum starts hoarding more and more of them (she has a peculiar job which doesn’t help with this). As Benny’s special power is seen more as a mental health condition and Annabelle’s mental health condition is seen as willful messiness, they have to negotiate their landlady’s son, keen to evict them and make money selling the house, the vagaries of school and then mental health services and then a psychiatric hospital, and some rather magical people who Benny meets who turn out not to be as magical as mental health services think they are …
Add to this the fact that Benny is in conversation with his own book throughout, the incursion of a Japanese nun who’s become a cult tidying expert and two women in the library, one of whom bears a noticeable resemblance to the author, and you’ve got a conventional coming of age / falling in love narrative and a conventional finding friends and redeeming yourself narrative (for both of them) woven into a comforting and challenging layer of Zen principles. There are some animal deaths, but I would say they are necessary to the narrative and not gratuitous.
There’s some nice stuff about reader response theory which feeds into the work I’ve done and am doing, too:
And then, when she’s finished and the book ventures out into the world, the readers take their turn, and here another kind of comingling occurs. Because the reader is not a passive receptacle for a book’s contents. Not at all. You are our collaborators, our conspirators, breathing new life into us. and because every reader is unique, each of you makes each of us mean differently, regardless of what’s written on our pages. Thus, one book, when read by different readers, bcomes different books, becomes an ever-changing array of books that flows through human consciousness like a wave. (p. 491)
In the end, a page-turner, a book I didn’t want to put down, loving Benny and his friends. Not quite as good as “A Tale for the Time Being” but definitely one I recommend.
Another NetGalley read I was tempted into: this time fortuitously it came up as a good book to review for Shiny New Books, so I have done so and you can read my full review here.
Benji Waterhouse – “You Don’t Have to be Mad to Work Here: A Psychiatrist’s Life”
(18 January 2024, NetGalley)
Waterhouse is at pains to show us, through work with inpatients and people in the community, the realities of life with perhaps more serious conditions than those that are being talked about a lot at the moment: we’re talking “chronic, severe labels deemed messier, uglier or outright feared – such as schizophrenia or bipolar, personality disorders or substance-misuse disorders”.
He works hard to show us the people behind the disorders and the circumstances which have often conspired to give rise to them and/or make them more critical, whether that’s chaotic families and relationships or conditions of poverty and homelessness. Although there’s a vein of the classic dark humour of the paramedic or mental health nurse, he comes across as humane and caring, worrying when he becomes a bit more brisk than he used to be in order to clear beds as he realises the state of the NHS. [read more]
Thank you to Jonathan Cape for accepting my request to read this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “You Don’t Have to be Mad to Work Here” was published on 16 May 2024.
I never knew these American “Saddle Club” novels growing up, but I’d aged out of any pony books but ones I already knew by the time these started publishing in 1988 (these are 1990s editions). Matthew found them for me in the San Diego Public Library library sale on a work trip, which is why I’ve left the price stickers on (25c each!). Out of the nine print books I acquired in March 2023, I have now read and reviewed six (and two of the others are in Spanish, while one is on my 20 Books of Summer). And yes, I did pick two “quick wins” from my older TBR to make some space on the shelves towards the end of last month. They also form part of my 2024 TBR project which I’m galloping through at the moment, ha ha.
Bonnie Bryant – “Horse Crazy” (The Saddle Club #1)
(6 March 2023, from Matthew)
In the first in a massive series of 101 books (some written by ghostwriters, apparently), we meet Stevie and Carole and their new friend Lisa, who comes to the stables to learn to ride. Stevie gets embroiled in a scheme to make money to go on an overnight trek they’re all keen on and of course needs to learn a thing or two. The usual rivalries and learning points ensue, and we learn a bit about horse care as we go along. I was pleased to read Carole is African American, although really in these two books there’s nothing to distinguish her experience from that of the others; still, I don’t think I’ve seen a Black girl in a British pony book (tell me if I’m wrong!).
Bonnie Bryant – “The Secret of the Stallion” (The Saddle Club Super Edition #2)
(6 March 2023, from Matthew)
The Super Editions are apparently a spin-off series, a bit longer than the originals, and here we get the amusement, found with the Three Investigators series, too, of an American author writing about Europe. The girls, plus nemesis Veronica, posh and self-absorbed, go to the UK to do a pony club exhibition at a three-day event. They have adventures in a very American London and that old school story staple of an Alarming Event happens, with people having to be saved. It’s interesting that class issues play out in US as well as UK horsey circles, with Veronica enthusiastically joining in but making a fool of herself.
Two fun novels, I would pick up more of these if I encountered them but won’t make a huge effort to buy the other 100-odd (also there seem to be a fair number of animal deaths in subsequent books!).
I bought this book in December 2021 with a handmade voucher that Gill had given me for The Bookshop on the Green, an independent bookshop in Bournville which has since closed temporarily and relocated (reopening in Summer 2024). This was part of a big chunk of books acquired even before Christmas came along, and I’m thrilled to say I have “dealt with” (read and reviewed all but one which I DNF) ALL of the books in this post! This also forms part of my 2024 TBR project, of course, and I read it last month so it predates my 20 Books of Summer, but I was glad to pick the next-oldest one off the TBR in advance of starting that!
James Rebanks – “English Pastoral: An Inheritance”
(12 December 2021, Bookshop on the Green)
But the new farming had created its own morality and ethics, and the people caught up in it had to change theirs, or get out, and thinkgs that inially shocked them soon became the new normal. (p. 130)
I feel like I’m a bit late to the party with this one, as everyone seemed to be reading it when it came out in 2020. It’s a wonderful book and one I’m very glad I read, even if it’s, by its very nature, a bit “Nature red in tooth and claw” in parts.
It’s divided into three sections: firstly, we meet James as a young lad, kept down by his father but close to his grandfather, who decides to teach him farming, grabbing his interest and making a farmer of him. He engages in the “old ways”, stopping the tractor to save a bird’s nest, allowing wild and woolly bits on the farm, too old to change his own ways and not keen for the next generations to, either. Then we move on to the time of transition when big fields were better fields, more chemicals were better chemicals … and the familiar birds and other wildlife had almost disappeared.
THEN the ecological movement starts, and James realises that he still knows the old ways of doing things and starts to embrace help and grants and surveys and all sorts from various parties, not rewilding as such – he’s not keen on true rewilding with its plagues of deer, though he does mention Isabella Tree in a positive way – but running his farm in cooperation, not competition, with wildlife, learning a lot more than he ever knew before about insects, etc.
Rebanks is open, honest about himself and his feelings and immensely rooted in his landscape and community. He’s open about what consumers need to do, too – pay attention to where our food is coming from, query why it’s so cheap, etc.
He pays tribute to the other farmers and their open-minded attitudes, and to his wife, who is raising their four children – she has a book now, too, which I’m really interested in reading!
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