Two light NetGalley reads – “Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame” and “Way Back”

I read up a storm on holiday with lots of free time and nice light novels available in my NetGalley March reads as well as more serious nonfiction. Here are two I enjoyed which coincidentally feature older heroines, which is nice – I guessed a plot point in one and I followed a red herring in the other!

Olivia Ford – “Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame”

(2 January 2024, NetGalley)

Jenny Quinn is 77 and has two secrets she’s keeping from her husband. The first has lasted the length of their marriage, the second is more recent as she’s decided to enter a Great British Bake-Off style cooking show. She makes a lovely friend in gay fellow contestant Azeez and gets a new lease of life after her husband Bernard appears to be settling into a smaller world (I mean, he’s over 80 so I think he gets to). They’ve always been close to Bernard’s niece and her family and they’re nicely drawn, with Max creating her social media presence as the competition hots up. Will she win the show or will events at home drag her out of it. And what of the other secret (which I did guess, but it was well and sensitively done and not everything was told in detail). A nice, absorbing read.

Thank you to Penguin for selecting me to read this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame” is published on 28 March 2024.

Sara Cox – “Way Back”

(31 January 2024, NetGalley)

Josie is 51 (hooray!) and lives a charmed life in leafy Hampstead with a well-off husband and a loving daughter, not having to work and getting to dabble, although it’s clear she made her own initial luck, fighting to get to university from a less-than-stellar start. But when it looks like her marriage is ending, she’s a bit lost. Thanks to a trip with her best friend to an eccentric wellness retreat full of rescue cats, she both visits her mum and pops in to the village – and farm – where she grew up before her dad died in an accident and her mum moved them then fell apart. When things in London are no longer so rosy and Fay’s off on a year’s sabbatical, should Josie take the plunge and revisit old haunts, where some people are new since she left and some remember her family only too well? Nice LGBTQ representation and a lovely pig and cat (which are both OK) with well-done farm scenes and a mystery I thought I’d worked out made for an ideal holiday page-turner.

Thank you to Hodder & Stoughton for selecting me to read this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “Way Back” is published on 28 March 2024.

Book review – Rob Drummond – “You’re All Talk”

I read this book in December but was sent it by the publisher to write a review for Shiny New Books, so had to submit that and wait for it to come out first. Here’s the different review I offer sometimes when I do that, with my more personal reaction to it emphasised. I have a background in studying sociolinguistics and then remaining interested in it, which gave me a slightly expert view on it, but I thought it was excellent and certainly learned a lot, too. My more professional (allegedly!), less personal, review on Shiny New Books is here.

Rob Drummond – “You’re All Talk: Why We Are What We Speak”

(November 2023, from the publisher)

This is a book about the relationship between how we speak and who we are. More precisely, it’s a book about the role of spoken language, specifically English, in creating all the different version of us that we employ in our day-to-day lives … The way we speak can provide a lot of clues about us – where we live or where we’re from, our social class, possibly even our jobs, and maybe more. (p. 4)

Rob Drummond is a professor of sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University and is particularly interested in accents and more generally the relationship between our selves and how we speak.

Drummond starts the book with an explanation of accents and a short and accessible history of English. We then broadly look at accents and class / race / gender / sexuality; discrimination; and language change.

This is a book that is firmly underpinned by a call for social justice – of all kinds. There’s discussion of intersectionality, i.e. the joint effects that our race, class, gender, etc. will have had on societal expectations of us and the way we speak, and there is a whole chapter on prejudice and discrimination around accents. Drummond makes a very good point here on the somewhat famous g-dropping criticism around football commentator Alex Scott, criticised roundly for doing something that posh white men talking about huntin’, shootin’ and fishing’ have done happily for centuries. He’s also clear that when people complain about “not understanding” people’s accents whose English is a second or additional language, it’s “a listener issue rather than a speaker issue” and often a way of, as he puts it, “laundering other prejudices into a socially acceptable format” (p. 127).

As part of the discussion on style-shifting and code-switching, which is associated with the above points, there are a fascinating few paragraphs about how people who learn a second or additional language out of necessity (after moving countries) will retain particular pronunciations that are non-standard so indicate their background, consciously, rather than striving for an exact match to the new country’s language and accent, in order to demonstrate their first language identity and the identities that come with that. He also criticises official policy that demands all residents speak English while not providing language courses and acknowledging how hard it is to learn another language. Aboriginal and other Indigenous languages and their role in the countries that include Indigenous communities are also included in this chapter; I appreciated the wide range of the book in this respect.  

I really liked the little personal and family anecdotes that are included in the book. I really enjoyed the discussion of covert prestige, which is where a less officially prestigious accent, such as Cockney, becomes a more appropriate accentual code than one’s own received pronunciation voice. It was very amusing to read that Drummond, like me and Matthew, resort to a Lahhhndun accent when conversing with people who mend things in our house, even while they usually have Bolton (in his case) or Birmingham (in ours) accents ourselves, to try to raise our acceptability and proximity to usefulness around the house!

There’s a suitably lively discussion of language change and the inevitable dire warnings about this. Drummond pleasingly discusses the gay slang language, Polari, referencing work done on the language by Paul Baker (who I have met and whose book on Polari I own!). Here he’s still careful to check for privilege, pointing out that the adoption of Black youth cultural language as having its own prestige by the majority group looking rather like cultural appropriation of language features marginalised groups have used to amplify their own voices: he shares another writer’s, Imani Benberry’s, advice that if you feel the need to adopt African American Vernacular English from time to time then you should also support Black lives and communities in “loud and consistent ways”. In the postscript he continues the social justice theme, asking readers to at least see how attitudes to language and accents can promote inequalities.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, even though I knew (or knew of) a fair bit of the content already. I had a smile at a couple of in-jokes: I loved his question “How many conversations actually include a discussion of bread rolls, or sport shoes, or small alleyways between houses?” (p. 11) as those are key terms that allow people to be identified by region of origin, but of course that is also true.

Thank you to Scribe for sending me a copy of this book to review for Shiny New Books, which of course I also did.

Book review – Various – “Furies”

I was determined to read this book, published this year to celebrate Virago Press’s 50th anniversary, this year, and I have got it in as hopefully my penultimate read. Phew! Kaggsy of the Bookishramblings kindly sent it to me after receiving and reading this review copy (she noted it on her blog with a link to her review on Shiny New Books). Of the eight books incoming in March this year I have now abandoned two and read and reviewed four, with one not reviewed on here yet, and one in the Reading With Emma pile.

Various – “Furies: Stories of the Wicked, Wild and Untamed”

(14 April 2023, gift)

A set of short pieces by women authors with themes suggested by reclaiming negative terms given to strong and strident women – think termagent, vituperator and the like.

Of course as with any set of short stories you’re going to like some more than others. It opens very strongly with an excellent almost Joyce Grenfell-esque story by Margaret Atwood with the Siren calling to order the Liminal Beings Knitting Circle, and other favourite pieces included Ali Smith’s I think non-fiction essay about her mum, “Spitfire” which broke the fourth wall, so to speak, and was very affecting. There was one piece in very poetic form and one that I unfortunately didn’t understand that was a graphic novel (graphic short story?), a powerful piece about a WWII rebellion I couldn’t face and a fascinating one about menopause and ageing, “Dragon” by Stella Duffy.

Monsters and those treated as monsters, and stories from all around the world by a diverse cast of writers, so a lot to enjoy here AND I got it read and reviewed in the right year, just!

Book review – Nikesh Shukla and Sammy Jones (eds.) – “Rife”

In a vain bid to get my TBR moving along (but more on that in a few days), I finally picked this one off my print TBR, the oldest one. I bought it in November 2021 when I really shouldn’t have been buying books because it’s Christmas and Birthday season (ahem: still doing this!) and of the eight books I bought then, I’ve now read and reviewed five, but of the four social justice books I bought in Oxfam that day, this is the only one so far.

Nikesh Shukla and Sammy Jones (eds.) – “Rife: Twenty-One Stories from Britain’s Youth”

(23 November 2021, Oxfam Books)

We’re going to get to a point where the country has moved so far away from what yong people want they are playing catch-up, and the stress point will test the fabric of what we consider important. This book is about the cracks starting to form. (Shukla, Introduction, p. xii)

This is such a great idea, a set of essays commissioned by Shukla’s Bristol-based organisation Rife (and published through Unbound) about young people’s experiences of life, education, work, mental health and sex/relationships. The only problem now is that this book was published in 2019, pre-Covid pandemic, and so it does unfortunately feel quite out of date. There’s still useful content by a wide variety of voices of authors who’ve had a wide variety of experiences, but, for example, a piece on the “university myth” would be very different when written about a lockdown degree.

I liked the class aspect, and its intersectionality in general, as you would expect with this editor, with a couple of writers being clear on gentrification of the area they grew up in or how university access courses only work so far. And although these pieces were written after Black Lives Matter started but before the big resurgence during lockdown, Ilyas Nagdee’s piece on education captures the start of the Why Is My Curriculum White? movement. Shona Cobb’s essay, “Exclusion” is a thought-provoking portrayal of living with a disability as a young person. The final piece in the book, Tom Greenslade’s “An Intergenerational Conversation” covers his work as a care worker for older adults and the way generations need to understand each other and not exist in bubbles.

So a worthwhile collection which is already becoming a historical document, and I’d like to see a pandemic or post-pandemic version

Book review – “Cold War Steve Annual 2024”

It’s been a few years since I sat with an annual to read on Christmas Day – probably back in my early teens with a Blue Peter or Pony Magazine one. But on Christmas Day 2023 I sat while Matthew cooked a good roast dinner and worked my way through a book of savagely satirical artworks by the very nice man, Christopher Spencer, aka Cold War Steve. I bought this at the event I went to this month hosted by The Heath Bookshop at the Kitchen Garden Cafe, with the excellent Kit de Waal interviewing Christopher: I didn’t really intend to buy the book but he was such a nice man, and his business such a cottage industry, that I did. And here it is, pictured somewhat incongruously with the jolly Christmas running leggings I’d worn to volunteer at parkrun in the morning.

“Cold War Steve Annual 2024”

(15 December 2023, The Heath Bookshop event)

A selection of 18 months’ worth of digital collages, allowing it to bring in a lot of his Covid-related pieces, including Partygate stuff, as well as more global themes, with some commentary from the artist, alongside essays by Kit de Waal, Stewart Lee and others, so decent value as there’s something to read and intricate images to pore over (and yes, as a prosopagnosic / face-blind person, there’s some irony in squinting at tiny images of faces added to grotesque bodies who you are trying to recognise, but I still enjoyed / appreciated the work).

The famous pieces are here – Tory politicians pissing on the Covid memorial wall (Spencer rather sweetly confided at the event that he checked with the Covid Relatives group before republishing that one), that image of the late Queen alone at Prince Phillip’s funeral contrasted with Tory partying on the opposite page … There are many more, some gross, some pushing right against the edges of decency: but as the artist says, whatever he portrays is a million times less indecent than the behaviour of our so-called leaders.

I think of this as a historical document to hang on to. You can find the Cold War Steve website, including the shop, here.

Book review – Kimberly McIntosh – “Black Girl, No Magic”

The last NetGalley book I read published in June but I’m reviewing slightly out of order to keep them in publication order (the hoops we make ourselves jump through!). I was attracted to this book by it’s theme of essays by a British Black woman who spends time wondering why the opportunities she has had don’t seem to be shared by everyone who looks like her. It promised back-up from policy and social science research as well as life-telling.

Kimberly McIntosh – “Black Girl, No Magic: Essays and Reflections on Living Whilst Black”

(25 March 2023, NetGalley)

I’ve based so much of my value in what I achieve of how people perceived me and … and none of it matters. I just thought – who cares?! And I can’t believe I never thought of it before.

The above quotation is taken from the end of the book, in a conversation with the author’s therapist which is recorded just before the acknowledgements. And this break-through means McIntosh was able to write this honest and messy book which serves to record an individual life and general learning points.

I have read quite a few essay collections and musings on race and society by young Black women now, but there’s always something different, and I think here it was the class aspect, although we have had that with Afua Hirsch. So her accent and the people she knows have afforded her privileges, she shares some amusing glossaries of posh people stuff, and she spent quite a while thinking that all Black people had to do was try harder and show excellence to be accepted and succeed. But things are more nuanced than that in the book, as she critiques institutional racism, the “illusion of inclusion” in which organisations practise colourism in order to make you think they’re for everyone while using only light-skinned women in their adverts.

McIntosh makes the point that as a younger woman, she has made all her discoveries and realisations online,, recorded in articles and think pieces, pieces which now won’t go away. There’s quite a lot about how her education taught her how to avoid STIs but not how to buy and take drugs safely and a chapter that’s half-satire and half-how-to on drug-taking, which does explain how to stay safe but is a slightly odd intrusion: but it’s her book of essays and she can include what she wants.

Lively, messy and open (but well-referenced), a good insight into younger Black female lives today, with the interest of a middle-class education in mainly White spaces.

Thank you to The Borough Press for choosing me to read this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “Black Girl, No Magic” was published on 22 June 2023.

Book review – Kacen Callender – “Lark and Kasim Start a Revolution”

Here I am with my sixth read for Cathy from 746 Books‘ 20 Books of Summer (Winter) challenge – this year, I’m reading 20 books bought from our local independent bookshop, The Heath Bookshop (find most of these books on their bookshop.org page!). You can see the book lists and results from all my previous attempts here. I bought this one in my first book token haul of this year and it’s the first of those I’ve read – promoted up the pile from the original order so it could be added to my Pride Month reads – but the rest of them will feature later in the summer. I was really looking forward to reading this novel for young adults, but in the end I don’t think it was really aimed at me and that mattered this time.

Kacen Callender – “Lark & Kasim Start a Revolution”

(08 January 2023, older book tokens splurge)

Besides, there isn’t any point in being annoyed. I learned from an early age that I don’t get to be angry or frustrated. Some people are allowed to take up space in this world, while other people are expected to disappear. When we don’t disappear, we’;re hated and then blamed for that hatred. ‘If only you’d been nicer. If only you’d smiled. If only you’d just sit down and shut up, maybe people wouldn’t hate you so much. It isn’t fair but there’s a lot about this world that isn’t fair, right? (p. 7)

Lark and Kasim used to be best friends but something went awry last year and now it’s awkward when Kasim comes around (which he does often, as Lark’s mum is concerned when he has to stay at home alone when his big brother is away working). Lark’s mum calls them out on the awkwardness but doesn’t understand.

Lark and Kasim are both Black trans teens and Lark has self-diagnosed as neurodivergent. They go to a free summer school run by cool tutors, the creative writing tutor the one they spend most time with; most of their classmates are “othered” by society by dint of their gender identity, sexuality, neurodivergence or how they are racialised (or several of the above), apart perhaps from two kids who act as trolls in class and online.

In a metafictional touch, Lark is a writer who is querying their novel featuring Birdie, a winged creature from a tolerant and diverse future to various publishers, most of whom criticise it for having too many genderqueer characters, being too “teen” or being “not Black enough” and even that the main character in a novel shouldn’t be a writer! and Birdie is a character in this book, too (which greatly confused me at first!).

So, it’s great to see all this diverse representation, intersectoinally around race/gender/neurodiversity (there’s an excellent ND supporting character I really liked) and I’m sure early-to-mid-teens will love that. The actual plot revolves around a tweet sent by accident about unrequited love, and a lot of the book revolves around how social media operates, how the various characters try to use and manipulate it and how it bites them back, leading to a solution around telling the truth, being your authentic self and calling people in, not out.

It’s good on the perils of getting cancelled and how people interact and I’m sure it will be very useful to the digital native generation. For me, it’s going over old ground a little – but I’m very much not who this book is marketed to. The lack of swear words and graphic scenes (everyone seems keen to be in polyamorous relationships, but it’s all very sanitised) leads me to think it would be suitable for a younger teen and I would very happily recommend it to such, and it offers some good learning points nicely presented by characters and their development rather than preaching.

So a good book for someone – lots of people – but not necessarily for me. In a Bookish Beck serendipity moment, there’s mention here of inherited epigenetic intergenerational trauma being possibly held by White people (who have had enslavers and rapists in their ancestors) as well as Black people (who are descended from enslaved peoples) which I came across relatively recently in Nova Reid’s “The Good Ally“.

This was Book 6 in my 20 Books of Summer challenge and Book 3 for Pride Month. You can buy a copy from The Heath Bookshop’s page on bookshop.org,

Book reviews – Sam Selvon – “The Housing Lark” and Caleb Femi – “Poor”

Two books read for Novellas in November which detail Black men’s lives in London 55 years apart but with many similarities as well as differences. Of course the men in Sam Selvon’s novel, Selvon himself, have fairly recently arrived in London from Caribbean countries, while poet Caleb Femi was born in Nigeria. South London features heavily in both – Brixton and Peckham, respectively; I don’t know Brixton that well but I lived in Peckham for a year in the mid-1990s, well before the gentrification I’ve been reading about in later novels and at the time of the North Peckham Estate, which Femi records in detail in his poems and photographs. Both men detail simple wishes for safety, companionship, some money, some way to advance in life. Both have friends laughing at friends who wouldn’t know what to do with the women they are chasing if they caught them, and both feature strong, uncompromising women.

I bought “The Housing Lark” in November 2021 after it was mentioned on Ten Million Hardbacks’ blog; out of the eight print books purchased that month, I’ve read two so far, but that is only still a year ago. “Poor” came in Bookish Beck’s parcel-before-last in December 2021 and I’ve actually read four out of the ten making up the pile I gathered before Christmas that year!

Sam Selvon – “The Housing Lark”

(04 November 2021)

Is so life was, you had to take chances, and one day your luck might turn. And if you yourself ain’t have anything to offer, it good to stick with fellars like Harry, and Alfy and Syl and the rest of the boys. All of we can’t be blight, Bat think, out of six seven fellars, one bound to be lucky, something good bound to happen to one of we. Bat ain’t care who it happen to, as long as he around to share in the good fortune. (p. 34)

I can’t remember if the characters in this short novel appeared in “The Lonely Londoners” but we’re back in familiar territory with a disparate group of men struggling to survive in a mainly unfriendly and difficult post-war London. We open with Battersby regarding his rented room, hoping the lamps on the wallpaper might issue a genie, wishing for simple things, food, company, money. The plot revolves around the resolve of a group of friends to club together to buy a house – the only way they can see of getting secure accommodation and their own agency.

Maybe it’s not such a good idea to make Battersby the treasurer, as the money seems to fritter itself away … He does run a coach trip to Hampton Court which gives us a hilarious interlude as the participants eat and laugh their way around, observed with some alarm by their White counterparts, and of course it’s the women, Battersby’s sister Jean, her room-mate Mathilda and Teena, unfortunate enough to be married to one of the men, who take the scheme in hand and make it work. Written in dialect like “The Lonely Londoners”, like that novel, too, it’s both funny and tragic, the characters making the best of their situation, destitution only one step away.

Interestingly, it has a very modern comment to make about education:

‘I must say you boys surprise me with your historical knowledge. It’s a bit mixed up, I think, but it’s English history.’ ‘We don’t know any other kind. That’s all they used to teach we in school.’ ‘That’s because OUR PEOPLE ain’t have no history. But what I wonder is, when we have, you think they going to learn the children that in the English schools?’ (pp. 100-101).

A touching and lively novel and an important record of first-generation immigrants’ lives.

Caleb Femi – “Poor”

(11 December 2021 – from Bookish Beck)

This will not be enough for them

so they’ll force us to put it into words

& we will say: When hipsters take selfies

on the corners where our

friends died, the rent goes up. (“On Magic / Violence”, p. 39)

I have read more poetry this year than I have for a long time; I still favour the very clear and direct and I got a bit lost in the allusions in this one (I was mainly OK with the language and dialect terms) but could see my way through a good proportion of them. I’m not sure “enjoyed” is the word as most of them are very hard-hitting and full of pain and distress, but it’s an important and strongly beautiful collection of both words and images.

With poems about the concrete landscape and the miles of walkways connecting the spaces of the North Peckham Estate, the poetry is going to be unyielding and strong, but there’s a lot of feeling, emotion and care in the book, from the unconventional signs of spring (young boys play on the grass, people get the new trainers) to the moving eulogies for Damilola Taylor, Mark Duggan and the Grenfell Tower residents. It’s worth looking at the notes, which explain which poems are memorialising which lost people.

There’s anger and understanding of anger, with some very powerful poems about the “riots”/uprisings and their meanings, and there’s bewilderment at the start of the gentrification which has now hit the South London suburb (I have most notably read about this in “Yinka, Where is your Huzband?“). The images of people and tower blocks work perfectly with the poems, couplets and prose pieces and the work is technically complex and adept, pulling at the heartstrings, raising a smile, documenting how it feels to feel you are every Black man who is shown mistreated on the TV. I hope this reached a variety of audiences, including those people who are portrayed in it and will see themselves in a poetry book published by a mainstream publisher, for once. Rebecca’s review which originally attracted me to the book is here.

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These were Books 6 and 7 for Novellas in November, both from the original selection of 15.

Book review – Siobhan Daniels – “Retirement Rebel”

Vertebrate Publishing are an excellent indie publisher and Britain’s leading publisher of outdoor adventure books and guides. They have all sorts of guidebooks and cover wild swimming, climbing, cycling, running and nature books. I have been lucky enough to join their mailing list for review copies, although I also purchase books from them direct, and they’ve all been hits so far!

Siobhan Daniels – “Retirement Rebel: One Woman, One Motorhome, One Great Big Adventure”

(7 October 2022, from the publisher)

Even then I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to do it, but I knew I had to do it to find my happy place. And to inspire other women not to give up when life gets tough, but to find a new path for the next phase of their lives. (p. 27)

Siobhan Daniels was working in local BBC broadcasting when she realised she was increasingly encountering ageism and sexism, suffering through the menopause with no support and coming up against bosses who belittled and bullied her. Having run a marathon with her daughter at 48 and had a “mature gap year” in her 50s where she backpacked around the world, but having dropped into depression and anxiety and inactivity since,  she gathers up her reserves of strength, takes early retirement, gets a camper van (a proper big one with a shower and toilet) and goes off around the UK.

The book was more than this, though. Daniels is absolutely passionate about empowering other older women, of pro-ageing rather than anti-ageing products, of following your dreams however much you have to struggle to do so. Through the book she shares how she promotes this message via articles, interviews and TV and radio, using her knowledge and connections. She also doesn’t shy away from the difficulties, especially when newly out and about with her caravan, relying on her brother and other campers to help – and finding a lot of kindness and support.

Covid strikes in this book, as so many, and it’s difficult for Siobhan to find somewhere to stay as she literally lives in her van. She has special compensation to stay on two different campsites in two different locations, but it takes a while for the locals to catch up with this and she has difficult times for a while.

Although the messages of frustration at the treatment of older women and the desire to empower others were repeated a bit (maybe the book was partly constructed from blog posts, which is how this issue often crops up), it was a powerful and important one, chiming with both the increasingly strong calls for menopause support and older women who are not as incapable as they’re made out to be. I loved all the detail in the book, which I suspect only a middle-aged or older woman would think to include: how she kept registered at doctors’ and dentists’ and got her Covid vaccinations, for instance. She’s also honest on the effect of her sudden travels on her daughter, who was concerned about safety and security and could have done at times with a mum who was in one place, though they did go through this together. The reunions with old friends were delightful, too.

Full of self-actualisation and the kindness of strangers, this is a heartwarming and inspiring read for anyone, especially those of us who are women in our middle years and further on.

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Thank you to Vertebrate Books for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review. “Retirement Rebel” is published today, 20 October 2022. You can buy it from Vertebrate Publishing here (they do a great discount if you join their mailing list, too!).