I read the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021 shortlist

 Another year, another collection of six powerful books written by talented women that I read as if my opinion on the matter is in any way influential. This year, I buddy read a great chunk of the Women’s Prize shortlist with my friends Hannah and Charlie, which greatly enhanced the reading experience — no wonder female celebrities keep creating book clubs, because reading books in tandem with your friends is remarkably fun. Proportionally, I enjoyed this year’s shortlist more than I did last year’s, although as with last year, I am personally disappointed with the choice of winner (not that Piranesi is a bad book; I just liked Unsettled Ground more as a potential winner). Without further ado, my reviews are below, listed in the order that I read each book. 

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

“Nothing is going to change,” he says.

“Really?”

He puts his fiddle to his jaw and runs the bow across the strings. “It’s always been the three of us, here. Hasn’t it? Now it’ll be the two of us.” 

Unsettled Ground isn’t the kind of book for which I would usually reach, but in this instance, I’m glad I did. Jeanie and Julius are 51-year-old twins, the trajectory of whose lives are the victim of their mother’s questionable decisions and choices during their youth. The dilemmas in which the twins found themselves throughout the book initially inspired pity, then frustration, then empathy — I found myself performing a real exercise in “thoughtfully considering other peoples’ socioeconomic backgrounds” that I wasn’t expecting to encounter when I began the book. Around the middle, I started getting frustrated with Jeanie’s stubbornness and Julius’s misguided optimism, and disliked their inability to just get on with things, instead moping around feeling sorry for themselves because the world has moved on without them. I do still think that it’s pointless to mope about being left behind by the rest of the world — it’s a dog-eat-dog world baby, catch up or die trying — but my friends with whom I buddy-read this did gently point out to me that Jeanie and Julius didn’t come from a strong socioeconomic background, and weren’t just being left behind by the world; they had been set back by miles simply by being born into the family that they were. Ultimately, this was an interesting lesson in empathy, and I appreciated the work that Claire Fuller did to ensure that each character was starkly, humanly complicated. My takeaway: shelve your pride, life is too short to not take handouts! Also, don’t lie to your kids.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

"She'd always felt like the older sister, even though she only was by a matter of minutes. But maybe in those seven minutes they'd first been apart, they'd each lived a lifetime, setting out on their separate paths. Each discovering who she might be."

What a phenomenal book! On entertainment value alone, this book gripped me from page one and held me captive all the way through. Often, literary fiction is so conceptual and overly ideological that it becomes inaccessible to the average reader; on the flip side, accessible literature can sometimes struggle to convey complex themes with any significant nuance. The Vanishing Half found the perfect medium: ideologically strong without being too dense, exciting without being too vapid. A particular niche that I enjoy in historical fiction is when a novel travels through time non-linearly, such as in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, where Monique and Evelyn jump backwards and forwards in time as they uncover Evelyn's past. Similarly, The Vanishing Half cuts in and out of different timelines, feeding us fragments of the future in order to intrigue us about what may have happened in the past to catalyse them. And the characters! So intricate, so tortured, so textured, every one perfectly unique and yet each contrasting each other in a specific, thoughtful way. As a twin myself, novels with twins as main characters always strike a particular chord with me, and I felt so recognised in all of the ways Stella and Desiree mirrored each other, and all of the ways in which they were radically opposite. There is simply so much to say about this book, and I don't have enough time to say it all. I loved it, and I love to see books like this on the Women's Prize shortlist.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”

A bit of a miss for me, unfortunately! I'm not a fantasy fan, and I prefer books with conclusive endings, so Piranesi and I were never destined to have much chemistry. Certainly I can see how thematically strong and joyously whimsical it is, but it didn't check any of my boxes and was ultimately forgettable for me. I was amazed that this one won the Prize, simply because it was so unmemorable to me that I completely forgot it was even on the shortlist. 

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

“Couldn’t he see her arms all full of the sapphires of the instant?”

Hmm. Not a big fan of this one. It started off as an indictment of Internet culture, then halfway through, became a rumination of how there's more to life than tweeting, and this transition was not done seamlessly: it was one thing, and then it was the other. I did appreciate that it was broken up into small, bite-sized paragraphs to imitate how our attention spans have all shrunk to 240 characters, but I didn't appreciate that most of those bite-sized paragraphs were needlessly conceptual gibberish. The thing is, I agree with this novel's conceit: the Internet has skewed our perspective of what is and isn't important, and it has made performance artists and narcissists out of us all, and there is more to life than crafting tweets with just the right balance of universal comprehension and niche meme references, and sometimes it can take a tragic or traumatic event to remind us of this. And I did like that; I like how the tragedy through which the narrator's family goes realigns what is and isn't important to the narrator. The issue is that the book delivers its message in an awfully pretentious way, and to be honest, I don't know if there is a method of delivering that message without it being pretentious. Like, hur dur internet bad. We get it. Did you have to write a whole book about it?

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones

“You understand that if you must learn to love a man, he is probably not the man you should be loving.”

Excruciatingly boring, depressing, and violent. I think this book creates a strong atmosphere, and paints a vivid picture of life in Barbados for both natives and tourists with its multitude of perspectives. We see the systems of racism, misogyny, violence, and abuse that are deeply entrenched in Barbadian culture (according to this book, at least — I don't know if this is an accurate portrayal as I don't know anything about Barbados, except that Rihanna is from there). However, I did not find this book interesting in any way. Although the setting was vivid, the characters were boring and flat and there were simply too many of them for the story to come together in any cohesive way. I was so bored that I skim-read the last 60 pages, which is basically an act of sacrilege for me, and I STILL couldn't finish it fast enough. I would never have finished this if it wasn't for my personal challenge to read the entire Women's Prize shortlist. This is one of those ones where I understand the literary value of the novel, but that value lends no enjoyment to the story — not that a story has to be enjoyable to be worthy of publication, but for me personally, it has to be enjoyable for me to actually, you know, enjoy it. Or at least read it without feeling grieved by the time I spent on it. 

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

“If I've thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remember what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.”

This one caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting to like it so much, but I found it unpredictably enjoyable and its ideas were very accessible, which was a pleasant surprise. We follow Gifty, an introspective young woman of Ghanian heritage whose brother died of a heroin overdose after a sports injury left him addicted to OxyContin, and whose mother, as a result, is bedridden with depression. A decade later, Gifty is a neuroscience candidate at Stanford and is studying reward-seeking behaviour and the neural pathways of addiction and depression, while also coming to terms with how science can or can't intersect with the faith she savoured growing up as an attendee of an evangelical Alabama church. I liked that this book explored deep and intense topics in a comprehensible manner — I really do believe that significant meaning and symbolism never need to be as aloof and impenetrable as so much literary fiction makes them out to be. Gifty had a fervently religious upbringing in a Pentecostal church in the Deep South, and even thought that she was saved as a child, but after her brother died, she turned to science to try and answer questions that her faith couldn't resolve. The memoir-ish telling of this story lets us travel through these questions alongside Gifty, and I liked that the personable, stream-of-consciousness narrative/writing style made Gifty's emotional journey seem to unfold naturally, as opposed to having been decidedly pre-determined by the author. I'm also morbidly fascinated by the opioid crisis and how opioid abuse ravages mid-to-low income families in middle America, and this was an excellent instalment in my pursuit to read more of that type of fiction. Although Gifty as a character felt a bit flat to me, I thoroughly enjoyed the messages and morals for which she was a vehicle, and I'm glad to have read this and to have it on my shelf. 

Ngā mihi nui,

Sarah

FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2020

 My favourite blog post of the year is my yearly wrap-up, and I traditionally write and upload it during December of the year in which those books were read. In 2020, I didn’t do this. No one had a good 2020, but I had a particularly hard and miserable one, and I had little interest in reading, let alone writing a lengthy blog post. Now that we’re three quarters of the way through 2021, and I’m finally recovering from the nightmare that was 2020, it’s time for my 2020 favourites; after all, if anything good happened last year, it’s that I read several phenomenal novels. This list is in no particular order. 

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

In The Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman’s metaphor is imagined as a literal network of train tracks and tunnels concealed beneath the Southern soil. The protagonist, Cora, is enticed by a fellow slave named Caesar into fleeing their plantation, but things go awry when Cora kills a white boy who tries to capture her, making them targets of a merciless manhunt. Cora and Caesar travel on the Railroad from state to state, searching for somewhere they can be truly free, but there is no rest for the wicked as the pair struggle to outrun the notorious slave catcher Ridgeway, who is hot on their heels and out for blood.

One of the many excellent qualities of this novel was its unflinching portrayal of the barbaric conditions to which slaves were subjected. I appreciated that Whitehead didn’t cringe away from depicting the full scale of violence that slave owners inflicted against their slaves; the brutality was gruesome, horrific, and regularly deadly, and Whitehead offered no reprieve from this reality, forcing the reader to acknowledge the inhumane events on which the novel is based. I liked being held accountable, forced to look history in the eye. I also liked that the novel considered multiple perspectives — it was interesting to learn how people in different circumstances interpreted the customs and habits of the time period. Similarly, I liked that the story took place across multiple locations; I found it supremely educational to see how different states and communities treated slaves. The Underground Railroad is the rare, invaluable combination of entertaining and educational that I always value in a story, and I’m excited to read more of Colson Whitehead’s backlist in the future; his literary award catalogue features the MacArthur Genius Grant and two Pulitzer Prizes, so I’m confident his other novels will enthrall me as much as this one did. 

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

This novel is not for the faint of heart. Set in the wake of the #MeToo movement with a backdrop of such scandals as the 2017 Harvey Weinstein bombshell, this scorching debut follows Vanessa who, at age 15, entered a sexual relationship with Jacob Strane, an English teacher at her high school who is 36 years her senior. Seventeen years later, another former student has made allegations of sexual abuse against the same teacher, and Vanessa is forced to reckon with the possibility that what she thought was a dark, romantic love affair may actually have been sexual abuse. 

This book is frustrating and uncomfortable and so, so necessary. I particularly liked the way it portrayed victimhood, and the blistering analysis it provided of the responsibility that women often take on for their own assault. Vanessa’s stubborn conviction that she what had with Strane was love is aggravating, but regrettably realistic: like so many other women who have been assaulted by men in power, Vanessa held herself responsible, convinced herself that she wielded power over Strane, that she initiated their affair, that she was in control. Although it is certainly a distressing and difficult story to pick through, I really do believe that My Dark Vanessa is essential reading from which one will emerge with much greater empathy for survivors of sexual abuse. Vanessa is an infuriating, but ultimately empathetic woman whose story has never been more critical, and as we travel deeper into the systematic unravelling of the patriarchal power that enables men to manipulate young girls in the way Strane manipulated Vanessa, I hope that Vanessa’s struggle to own her victimhood will make women in similar situations feel less isolated and alone.

The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter

The Good Daughter is a crime thriller about two sisters, Sam and Charlie, whose childhood is blown apart by a violent attack on their family home. Their father is a defense attorney, whose notoriety makes him the subject of many targeted attacks, the worst of which leaves his wife murdered, one daughter crippled, and the other emotionally scarred. Twenty-eight years later, Charlie has become a lawyer herself. When she becomes the prime witness in a court case that reminds her painfully of her past, old leads come unburied as she investigates what would motivate a naive teenage girl to commit cold-blooded murder in a middle school hallway.  

I fucking loved The Good Daughter. Despite its brutality, nothing is sensationalised; yet despite the professional detachment with which the violence is viewed, it still has so much heart, and makes you feel intensely for each character. It asks us to consider scenarios from multiple points of view, and empathise with people whom we would normally regard with contempt. An impressionable girl who brings a gun to school, a defense attorney who has helped many disreputable men go free because he believes everyone deserves a fair trial, a man who committed murder against his better judgment; perhaps these crimes cannot be forgiven, but it is important to set our emotions aside and fight to find the truth. Additionally, Sam and Charlie are fascinating women, and their troubled dynamic felt truly authentic considering their nightmarish adolescence. Both women regularly screw up and make questionable decisions that they later regret, but ultimately, they’re fighting for what they think is right, just like their father, and it’s this humanity that made them so compelling to read. If you enjoy legal thrillers, I cannot stress enough how fantastic The Good Daughter is, and highly recommend that you read it.

Lock Every Door by Riley Sagar

Jules Larsen has just broken up with her boyfriend, can’t get a job, and is feeling generally sorry for herself when an opportunity too good to pass up falls into her lap: an ad promising $12,000 in return for three months apartment-sitting a luxurious studio in the Bartholomew, one of Manhattan’s most enigmatic apartment buildings. The rules of the job seem harmless: no visitors, no nights spent away from the apartment, and no disturbing the Bartholomew’s rich, elusive residents. Jules eagerly accepts the offer, and when her downstairs neighbour, Ingrid, expresses concerns about the dark history surrounding the building, Jules brushes her off as just another eccentric resident. The next day, however, Ingrid has disappeared without a trace, and Jules begins to suspect that everything at the Bartholomew is not as it seems. 

Lock Every Door was a rollercoaster ride from start to finish. The details of the mystery were dished out at a tantalising pace that kept you both well-fed but still needing more, and they were clever enough that I was able to pick up on them without knowing how or why they fit into the story. The main criticism of this book is that the ending is simply too ludicrous, but I didn’t find this to be the case at all. It was a little unhinged, absolutely, and certainly out of left field, but I felt it took the perfect tone considering the preceding suspense. Overall, Lock Every Door was an immensely satisfying read: I was spooked but not too scared to sleep, intrigued but not completely lost, and the ending wraps everything up nicely instead of leaving loose ends for me to tie up myself, which I much prefer to open endings. It has a fantastic mystery, a compelling Gothic atmosphere, and an incredibly imaginative ending. I would highly recommend this to anyone looking for a thriller with a strong mystery element, as well as everyone who loves haunted house stories: the Bartholomew may not be literally haunted, but its dark history is haunting as hell.

Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane 

Ask Again, Yes is a slow-burning drama about two families, the Gleesons and the Stanhopes, whose breadwinners, Francis and Brian respectively, are partners in the NYPD and who live next door to each other in upstate New York in the early 1980s. We follow three generations of the two families, starting with the two rookie cops and ending with their grandchildren, but the story ultimately circles around Kate, Francis’s daughter, and Peter, Brian’s son, whose childhood friendship grows into a star-crossed romance after a violent tragedy sends the families spinning in opposite directions. 

The premise of Ask Again, Yes instantly brought Celeste Ng to mind, which is high praise: I will read anything that Celeste Ng writes. I loved that this book didn’t rely heavily on plot — although the plot that is present is breath-taking in its suspense and devastation — but instead focused on developing the characters and creating rich, complex personalities for each of them. Despite the ensemble cast of multiple extended families, by the end of the novel, you feel as if you know everyone intimately, and you care about them more than you reasonably should. Kate and Peter are the centrepiece of the novel, and the A-plot concentrates on the development of their relationship throughout the years and the ripple effect that the novel’s defining tragedy has on the rest of their lives; however, I felt a particular kinship with Peter’s mother, Anne, an Irish immigrant whose unstable emotional state is generally misunderstood throughout the majority of the book. She remains undiagnosed throughout the novel (although I suspect bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder), but her wild mood swings and erratic behaviour force an irreparable wedge between the two families that she struggles, in later years, to dig out. To me, Anne represents the novel’s major themes of forgiveness and acceptance. The inciting incident and ensuing tragedy are undeniably Anne’s fault, but as the years pass and time dulls the razor-edged memory, it becomes possible to forgive her crime and acknowledge that she isn’t the black-and-white villain she is perceived to be; she’s a troubled woman who wasn’t getting the help she needed. She cannot be completely exonerated of her transgression, but she can, eventually, be forgiven, and I loved that this novel gave us enough time to watch as time filed down the edges of traumatic childhood memories, allowing compassion to slowly seep in. If you’re interested in family dramas, or you’re hunting for novels that are along the lines of the inimitable Celeste Ng, Ask Again, Yes is not one to miss.

Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow

This one really surprised me. Catch and Kill follows journalist Ronan Farrow’s quest to expose the allegations of sexual abuse against Harvey Weinstein, and the challenges he faced as he chased those stories, from internal company politics to covert black-ops intelligence operations. Part spy-thriller, part investigative journalism, Catch and Kill breaks ground on the abuse of power in Hollywood high society and uncovers the lengths to which men like Weinstein will go in order to camouflage and perpetuate their corruption. 

I picked this up because I wanted to educate myself about the allegations against Harvey Weinstein (and because I didn’t realise that She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey was about the same thing). I was hoping to learn more about what led to and inspired the #MeToo movement, but I wasn’t expecting to be so thoroughly enraptured with Farrow’s journalism and storytelling as he detailed the mountains he had to move in order to get this story published. I knew that Weinstein was an enormous piece of shit who abused an astronomical number of women, including an astonishingly long list of well-known actresses, and that he used his insurmountable wealth and influence to manipulate these women into silence and threaten their hard-won careers. What I didn’t know was that he also employed multiple intelligence agencies to spy on the journalists who were investigating him and prevent his sexual misconduct from becoming public. I really liked Ronan Farrow as a reporter; I thought he gave an excellent, unbiased account of what took place, and I admired that he made his fight to avenge Weinstein’s victims the focus of the book, while also giving us ample glimpses into his life in order for us to connect with him and invest in his determination to publish this story. He seems like a great guy with a strong moral compass, and I liked seeing a man dedicate himself to a story in order to vindicate women’s justice and liberty. I think that more people should read this book because it was great, informative investigative journalism that helped to expose the seedy underbelly of Hollywood. 

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo 

Girl, Woman, Other is a triumph of modern fiction, a prime example of exceptional literary talent that is not only meticulously crafted, but also performs a “sweeping history of the black British experience” (Gay, 2019). A polyphonic collection of character studies, the novel examines the lives of twelve black, British women throughout the last century, and was published in 2019 to a torrent of accolades: joint-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, a Sunday Times bestseller, one of Barack Obama’s 19 Favourite Books of 2019, and identified as Book of the Year in 25 different publications, including Oprah Magazine and TIME. It’s a high-profile piece of fiction, and for very good reason.

As a white woman, I couldn’t relate to a scrap of Girl, Woman, Other, but I loved it nonetheless. Informational and entertaining, the novel gave me incredible insight into a wide variety of black, female experiences, and the diversity of challenges that black women have encountered during the last century. My absolute favourite thing about this book is how many different intersections of womanhood it examined. Race, class, sexuality, gender identity, historical context; Evaristo considered it all, and I learned so much about so many different black/female experiences, and how the intersections of these different facets of personhood affect the way that women interact with the world, and how the world interacts with them. One of my favourite character studies in this book was that of Dominique, and her abusive relationship with Nzinga. It’s rare to see stories of domestic abuse in same sex couples; they’re often portrayed as more harmonious and idyllic than heterosexual relationships, but this isn’t universal, and it’s important to share stories about same sex domestic abuse and to acknowledge that abusive behaviour isn’t unique to men; women can be abusers, too. I also enjoyed Yazz’s perspective. Her youthful, righteous indignation was reminiscent of the fiery feminism that I paraded in my teens, and as the teens say, we do love to see it. Girl, Woman, Other is an impeccably unique work of feminist, female literature, and I believe it is essential reading for its invaluable perspectives and strong focus on the uniqueness of individual womanhood in all its variations and forms. 

Ngā mihi & kia kaha x

WORKS CITED

• Gay, R. (2019, December 28). Roxane's review of Girl, Woman, Other. Retrieved October 4, 2020, from https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3105399075?book_show_action=true.