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.
“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.
"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.
“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.
“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?
“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.
“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
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