“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.”
A slow starter, but Unsettled Ground did eventually grow on me, and lingered in my mind long after I read the final page. Jeanie and Julius are 51-year-old twins, the trajectory of whose lives are the victim of their mother’s questionable choices during their youth. The dilemmas in which the twins found themselves initially inspired pity, then frustration, then empathy — I found myself performing a real exercise in “thoughtfully considering other socioeconomic backgrounds” that I wasn’t expecting to encounter. Around the middle, I started getting frustrated with Jeanie’s stubbornness and Julius’s misguided optimism, and disliked the way they moped around feeling sorry for themselves because the world had 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 miles simply by being born into the family that they were. Ultimately, this was an interesting lesson in empathy, and I appreciated the work Fuller did to ensure that each character was starkly human, sometimes at the expense of their likeability. My takeaway: life is too short to not take handouts! Also, don’t lie to your kids.
[...] just like I was a different person now to the happy husband who was once married to Mary Rose, some new, half-living creature that had climbed out of the husk of that husband, someone I hardly even recognised as myself.
I was neither dead nor alive, but doomed to wander a desolate space between the two.
What a wonderful little book. Kathleen MacMahon has written a gorgeous, ponderous story about life after the death of a loved one, and how grief never really goes away; it just becomes more manageable over time. Grief follows you, haunts you, hovers over you at all times, a dark cloud over an otherwise sunny day. Oftentimes, it feels inescapable, incurable; when you are grieving, it is easy to convince yourself that you will never be happy again. But life, fickle little life, has a way of filling the holes that tragedy leaves behind, and this book captures that lifecycle in quiet, intimate detail. Although I'm not grieving anything quite as serious as a death, I am currently grieving something personal and painful, and this book made me feel as if my pain had been plagiarised and reworded better than I could ever hope to articulate it. It's quiet, contemplative, and hesitantly hopeful. I loved it.
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.
It seems that the message is 'we have liberated our sexuality, therefore we must now celebrate it and have as much sex as we want' [...] except 'as much sex as we want' is always lots of sex and not no sex, because then we are oppressed, or possibly repressed, and we're either not being true to our authentic selves, or we haven't discovered this crucial side of ourselves that is our sexuality in relation to other people, or we haven't grown up properly or awakened yet [...] There [is] 'little to no prominent affirmation of non-desire in sex positivity, and a lot of suggestions on how to 'fix' yourself'.
When I say that this is essential reading, I do not say that lightly. Asexuality exists on a wide, highly fluid, and often misunderstood spectrum that defies succinct categorisation, but Angela Chen makes a valiant effort to explore the many intersections that comprise the asexual spectrum. Not every essay hit its mark for me, given that some of the topics in the broad expanse that Chen examined weren't relevant to my experience, but on the whole I found this book to be extraordinarily life-affirming and I truly believe that everyone, asexual or not, should consider reading it. It provides invaluable insight into not only the nuances of the asexual experience, but sexuality as a whole, how it controls us, and how much freer we can be if we choose to prioritise relationships and connections other than those of the sexual variety. I talk about this book constantly, refer back to it daily, find peace and comfort in its words every time I am having a sexual identity crisis (which is basically every hour of every day); I learned in infinite amount not only about myself and my sexuality, but also about how asexuality relates to different intersections of life, including womanhood, feminism, disability, mental health, and more. I get emotional thinking about this book. I want everybody to read this book. I understand myself, and how I relate to the world, immeasurably more now than I did before reading this book, and all because it was so incredibly fucking validating to read about other people experiencing feelings that I thought only I had ever felt. Representation is so validating, and that is why it matters. This book is representation and education rolled into one, and I don’t think I will ever stop thinking about it or finding new enlightenment within its pages.
The impulse to flee persists; the horizon beckons. If she could just go farther, live nowhere, possess only an airplane, and if that airplane never needed to land, then maybe she would feel free.
From the first page, I knew that Great Circle was going to be my favourite fiction book of the year. Marian Graves is a deliciously complex character with an extraordinary life, and although the book is over 600 pages long, not a second was boring, not a moment felt wasted. The span and scope of this novel — from Prohibition-era Montana to modern day Los Angeles, war-torn Britain to the Ross Ice Shelf — astounded me, taking me on a historical and geographical journey the likes of which I had never endeavoured before. I loved every character, reveled in every perspective, gasped at every twist in the plot, and particularly adored the integration of real-life moments in aviation history; little historical cameos like Charles Lindbergh’s famous non-stop flight from New York to Paris in May 1927, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, and a walk-on from Jacqueline Cochran all brought exciting elements of realism to Marian’s story, while blurring the line between fact and fiction enough that I regularly had to remind myself that Marian was a fictional character, not a real pilot lost to the annals of history. My only criticism would be the under-utilisation of Hadley's perspective in the book. I really liked Hadley and loved reading in her snarky, witty, disillusioned voice, but I felt that she wasn’t used to her fullest potential; it was too clear that she was only present as a device to uncover secrets in Marian’s story, and although I appreciated that was a role she needed to play, it could have been less blatantly obvious that that was all she was there for. God, I loved this book. It grabbed me from the first page and never let me go, and I know that Marian Graves will live in my mind for a very long time.
Ngā mihi nui,
Sarah
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