2025/105: Breaking the Dark — Lisa Jewell

Her whole life has been a slow-motion multiple pileup. She lives on the edges of everything, at the sharp pointy corner of existence between normality and extraordinariness where she is neither one thing nor, truly, the other. She can do extraordinary things, but she doesn’t like doing them. But she can’t be normal either, she’s too broken, too other. [loc. 1217]

I'm not familiar with Jewell's thrillers, but I am a fan of Marvel's Jessica Jones, and had listened to an audiobook of another story featuring her, Playing with Fire. So, for the challenge involving two books in the same shared universe...

In Breaking the Dark, Jessica is recruited by a wealthy socialite who believes that something weird has happened to her children, Lark and Fox, while they stayed with their father in Barton Wallop, a small village in Essex (the UK version). They used to be normal (if privileged) teenagers, but now they just keep talking about everything being 'perfect': they're polished, glossy and uninterested in their old friends and hobbies, and they're obsessed with the Lloyd Cole song 'Perfect Skin'.

Jessica's broke and in a rut: she needs the money, so agrees to investigate. In England, she discovers a self-professed 'AI witch' who also talks about being (or at least looking) perfect, as well as a run-down farmhouse where a girl named Belle seems to be living in the thrall of an older woman named Debra.

In a parallel plot thread, a woman named Polly targets a young man named Arthur -- and his parents Ophelia and John, who have (a) an elderly cat and (b) a big secret. Polly wants to be a big-name beauty influencer, and has created a product line called Beauty X. But there's been some outcry about her ingredients, and she jumps at Arthur's suggestion of using quantum physics to achieve similar effects. Jessica (with the help of teenaged sidekick Malcolm, and longterm friend-with-benefits Luke Cage) uncovers Polly's dastardly plot, and the secret of that farmhouse: she also undergoes a change of her own.

This was a fun read, well-paced and suspenseful: Jewell's Jessica is very much the character I recall from the Marvel TV show, and I found her changing perspective on life very credible. Happy endings for the deserving few (though I felt very sorry for Mr Smith) and no lasting damage. And by the end of the novel Jessica's life is transformed: not perfect, but good.

...my husband said that this is the hardest he’s ever seen me working in all the twenty-five years I’ve been at this job! [Author's Afterword]

2025/104: Oracle — Thomas Olde Heuvelt

In both timelines there was a chain of events triggered by a smaller event on the North Sea. At Doggerland, it was the annual sacrifice they pushed off in a canoe. In the eighteenth century, it was the five sick hands they threw overboard to drown. ‘It’s been awakened,’ Grim uttered. ‘That thing from below. Its hunger was aroused, and now it’s demanding more . . .’ [p. 280]

I've enjoyed Heuvelt's previous novels (HEX and Echo: supernatural horror in the modern world, with layered narrative and unreliable narrators. Oracle -- in which an eighteenth-century plague ship suddenly appears in a tulip field -- ties together Doggerland, oil rigs, smallpox epidemics and oppressive regimes. The protagonists are Luca Wolf, aged thirteen, who watches his best friend Emma vanish into the ship (they're the first to see it) and, later, his father; Robert Grim, who appeared in HEX; Eleanor Delveaux, who heads a shadowy government department tasked with investigating weird phenomena; and Vincent Becker, a damage assessment inspector investigating a disaster at a North Sea oil rig called Mammoth III. This is not the only mammoth we will encounter.

Luca is a delight, as is his practical and open-minded girlfriend Safiya. Grim is rather two-dimensional (I don't really remember him from HEX). So is Eleanor, who was not endeared to me by the explanation '[she] knew she was hated and she didn’t care. In the male-dominated world of power, you had to be hard as nails to stand your ground. If that meant that she was perpetuating the stereotype of the unscrupulous battle axe, then tough'. 

The secondary characters, to be honest, are more interesting than most of the protagonists: a tulip-farmer haunted by the sound of a bell, a rig mechanic talking about discovering a gargantuan skull, a Guardian correspondent abducted in broad daylight... Where the novel excels is not in character depth but in visions of ancient rituals and curses, the living memory of catastrophic floods, the terrors of storms at sea: in Elder Gods, half-glimpsed horrors and human bodies metamorphosed into something dreadful. The climax is thoroughly cinematic, though the true resolution of the ancient conflict between humanity and the natural world is described only in the Epilogue.

This was a well-paced read with some evocative locations, nicely interwoven past-and-present, and the occasional echo of Lost. And there are hints that we'll see more of Grim in Heuvelt's future novels.

2025/103: Hemlock and Silver — T Kingfisher

I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife. [opening line]

A new T Kingfisher novel is always a delight, and Hemlock and Silver -- a dark and occasionally horrific riff on 'Snow White' -- has brought me great joy, right from that opening line.

Healer Anja is thirty-five years old, unmarried, an expert in poisons and their antidotes. The king, having informed her that he'd murdered his wife, wants her to cure his adolescent daughter, Snow, whom he believes is being poisoned. The money is good and the offer difficult to refuse. In short order, Anja is on her way to Witherleaf, an opulent palace in the desert. She meets the young princess, who is clearly hiding something; she runs tests, the results of which are inconclusive; and she encounters an excellent cat.

I loved the worldbuilding: the beasts of heaven rose up and slew the cruel, pitiless gods, and are worshipped as saints. (There is no Saint Cat.) Anja refuses to believe in magic, and approaches her work with scientific rigour. She's a likeable narrator with a pragmatic approach and a burning urge to understand the world around her.

There are elements of horror that reminded me of some of Kingfisher's darker works, such as The Twisted Ones and The Hollow Places: there's also romance, friendship and the aforementioned excellent cat ("His Gloriousness, God-King of the Deserts, Lord of Rooftops, King of Mirrors, Heir to the Mantle of Harar, He Who Treads the Serpent's Tail, Whose Claws Have Scarred the Bark of the Great Tree") who is key to the resolution of the mystery.

UK publication date is 19th August 2025: thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for my advance review copy!

2025/102: When Women Were Dragons — Kelly Barnhill

[Author's Note] I thought I was writing a story about rage. I wasn’t. There is certainly rage in this novel, but it is about more than that. In its heart, this is a story about memory, and trauma. It’s about the damage we do to ourselves and our community when we refuse to talk about the past. It’s about the memories that we don’t understand, and can’t put into context, until we learn more about the world. [p. 366]

Reread for Lockdown bookclub: original review here. I liked it even more the second time around, though I found myself focussing more on the silences, absences and unspoken truths of Alex's childhood than on the natural history of dragons. Interestingly, it felt a lot more hopeful when I read it in 2022 than now, nearly three years later.

Discussed with book club. Reactions were mixed. We wanted more about knots, and whether they were actually magic.

2025/101: The Silence of the Girls — Pat Barker

I was no longer the outward and visible sign of Agamemnon’s power and Achilles’ humiliation. No, I’d become something altogether more sinister: I was the girl who’d caused the quarrel. Oh, yes, I’d caused it – in much the same way, I suppose, as a bone is responsible for a dogfight. [loc. 1596]

This is the story of Briseis, a princess of Lyrnessus who was captured when the Achaeans sacked the city. Her husband and brothers were slaughtered, and she was given to Achilles as a prize. Later, Agamemnon's prize Chryseis was returned to her father, a priest of Apollo: plague had broken out and Apollo, the god of plague, needed to be appeased. Agamemnon complained about the loss of his property: Briseis was taken from Achilles and given to Agamemnon to replace Chryseis, and Achilles then sulked in his tent and refused to fight.

Of course the story is quite different from Briseis' point of view. She's witnessed the slaughter of her people, slithered 'along alleys cobbled with our brothers', been a victim of and witness to rape (at least as a noblewoman she isn't given to the common soldiers), and she has prayed for Apollo's vengeance. Patroclus is kind to her ('I know what it’s like to lose everything and be handed to Achilles as a toy'), and she becomes friendly with other women in the Greek camp as they nurse the wounded. But these are small comforts: she has become liminal, belonging neither with the living nor the dead. And she refuses to forget her former life.

Towards the end of the novel there are some scenes from Achilles' point of view: the arrival of Priam, the loss of Patroclus, the desecration of Hector's corpse. These scenes are an interesting counterpoint to Briseis' quiet despair and loathing: they show us Achilles' resignation in the face of his fate, and his desperate loneliness after the death of his only friend, and they illuminate some aspects of the warrior life. I don't think they were necessary, though: I'd rather have stuck with Briseis.

The Silence of the Girls ends with Briseis reflecting on how people hearing of Achilles' brief and glorious life won't want to know about the rape camps and the enslavement and the slaughter. Pregnant by Achilles and married to one of Achilles' captains, she's still, effectively, enslaved. The final words -- 'now, my own story can begin' -- feel trite.

Horrific brutality, colloquial speech, glimpses of the divine and supernatural (Briseis sits with her back to a bronze mirror and feels the rage of Achilles' ghost: earlier, his mother -- the goddess Thetis -- emerges from the sea), and a determination to survive, no matter what.

We’re going to survive – our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams – and in their worst nightmares too. [loc. 3595]

2025/100: Monsters — Emerald Fennell

The best thing about there being a murder in Fowey is that it means there is a murderer in Fowey. It could be anyone. [loc. 464]

The nameless narrator of Monsters is a twelve-year-old girl, orphaned in a boating accident ('Don’t worry – I’m not that sad about it') and living with her grandmother. Every summer she's packed off to an aunt and uncle who run a guest house in the quaint Cornish town of Fowey. There, she meets Miles, also twelve, and they bond over a murder -- a local woman found tangled in fishing nets. Miles and our narrator are fascinated by the notion of a murderer... but as their investigations proceed and more bodies are found, some uncomfortable truths are revealed. (I say 'revealed': some of the nastiest truths are merely hinted at.)

Most of the reviews seem to revel in the monstrosity of Miles and the narrator, and it's true that they are amoral little monsters. But I felt desperately sorry for her: I think that line on the first page, 'I'm not that sad about it', is ... not quite a lie, but a glib response to a horrendous situation. She has nobody: her grandmother is emotionally distant, her aunt is terrified, her uncle is horrific. No wonder she's so desperate for Miles to like her: no wonder she's not always in control of her own actions. She's as much a victim as the drowned eyeless girls who wash up with sea urchin fossils in their mouths.

I liked most of the novel, especially the vignettes of local characters: superstitious townsfolk, feeble Aunt Maria, poisonous Jean. The ending, though, seemed at once hasty and inconclusive. Yes, it resolved and explained most of the murders, but it felt out of tune with the rest of the story.

2025/099: The Story of a Heart — Rachel Clarke

Depending on your point of view, the transplantation of a human heart is a miracle, a violation, a leap of faith, an act of sacrilege. It’s a dream come true, a death postponed, a biomedical triumph, a day job. [loc. 199]

Keira, aged nine, is fatally injured in a traffic accident: her heart keeps beating but she is brain-dead. Max, also aged nine, has been in hospital for almost a year because his heart is failing. This is the story of how Keira (and, more actively, her family) saved Max, and of the people involved in the heart transplant - doctors, nurses, couriers, porters... It's a compassionate and engaging work of narrative non-fiction, this is the story of a heart transplant, and of how the death of one child and the saving of another led to a significant change in UK law.

While I was reading The Story of a Heart, it was announced as the winner of the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction: I hope this will prompt more people to read it. Clarke, trained as a doctor, is an excellent communicator of medical science: she's also adept at highlighting the little details. (Keira's young sisters, both convinced that she would have wanted to donate her organs, paint her fingernails orange while she's lying in intensive care.) 

I found this a moving, fascinating and sometimes sobering book: I think it's what I was expecting when I read Mend the Living (a novel that I thought at first was non-fiction) some years ago. They're both very good books.

interview with Rachel Clarke