2019/68: Briarley -- Aster Glenn Gray

“The curse says you must learn to love and be loved, does it not? Those are the only conditions?”
The dragon nodded, his head still buried in his hands.
The parson broke a piece off a roll and buttered it. “Then I suggest you get a puppy,” he said. [loc. 356]

A short, sweet M/M romance, set in rural England in 1940 and based on the story of Beauty and the Beast. Except in this version, the parson who steals a rose for his daughter won't let that daughter be traded for his theft: instead, he becomes the guest of the mysterious, draconic Briarley himself.

The parson -- we don't learn his name until late in the story -- is a sensible, pragmatic, thoroughly decent man, a veteran of the Somme, devoted to his daughter Rose and to his beloved dead. The Beast, Briarley, is a spoilt Victorian aristocrat who has read far too many melodramas. Their discussions of philosophy, theology and love illuminate both their characters -- and their growing respect and liking for one another.

And meanwhile, outside Briarley Hall, the war rages, the Luftwaffe roar overhead and Rose nurses the wounded...

Briarley is not a wholly likeable character, but there's an innate decency to him. The invisible servants are strongly characterised. And the parson is ... not at all what I'd expected of a country parson in 1940.

Humorous, thoughtful and sweet: a charming and calming read.

2019/65-67: Outlander books 6-8 -- Diana Gabaldon

2019/65: A Breath of Snow and Ashes -- Diana Gabaldon
2019/66: An Echo in the Bone -- Diana Gabaldon
2019/67: Written in My Own Heart's Blood -- Diana Gabaldon

Sometimes you just want to read something that is entertaining, distracting and long: so, when the black dog last bit, I embarked on 3000+ pages of Diana Gabaldon's 'Outlander' series, purchased piecemeal over the last year when they've been reduced-price on Amazon.

There is something very calming about reading a novel, or a sequence of novels, which feel more like a soap opera than a traditional beginning-middle-end work. I tend to read quickly and intensely -- often finishing a novel in one or two sessions -- and wondered whether this sense of dipping back into a serialised, episodic narrative over the course of weeks was a more usual reading experience, or one shared by those who read in snatched moments. I had little sense of an overall arc, though obviously there is such an arc -- as well as lesser arcs for individual characters -- in three long novels set between 1772 and 1778 in Colonial and Revolutionary America.

"So you got married, in spite of—I mean, you turned your whole life upside down, just to take care of Jamie Fraser's illegitimate son? And neither one of you ever talked about it?"
"No," he said, baffled. "Of course not." [A Breath of Snow and Ashes, p. 940]

A Breath of Snow and Ashes is overshadowed by time-traveller Claire's future memory of a newspaper report of her death, with Jamie, in a house fire. Jamie, meanwhile, is more concerned with the growing rebellion against English rule. Claire and Brianna have assured him that the rebels will win, and they've been right before -- the Jacobites did lose. But still ...

Bad things happen to everybody. There are new time-travellers, betrayals, murders, rapes and a plethora of cases for Claire Fraser, Medicine Woman. (In one of these Claire makes some unpleasantly homophobic assumptions and comments about Lord John Grey, who is by far my favourite character in the series. Grrr.)

Lots on the vagaries of preindustrial life -- setting out a bowl of honey and flour to catch wild yeast when the bread starter has died; years of tea being unavailable; the smell, the constant awareness of mortality, the dangers of a country-wide battleground where militia and redcoats clash. And of course the notion of women as property. But at least Claire, Roger and Brianna are not bothered by the mosquitos, who have no appetite for 20th-century blood.

I'd asked her if she thought it was possible for a traveler to change things, change the future, and she told me it was, obviously – because she changed the future every time she kept someone from dying who would have died if she hadn't been there. Some of them went on to have children they wouldn't have had, and who knew what those children would do... [An Echo in the Bone, loc. 5716]

Reunions familial and otherwise, lost heirs, historical personages, a return to the 20th century , espionage, the chaos of war ... a shipwreck, and an unexpected marriage. A lot happens. And a heck of a cliffhanger ending.

...he found himself surprisingly cheerful. Jamie Fraser was alive, and he, John, wasn’t married. Given those two marvelous facts, the dubious prospects of escape and the much higher probability of being hanged seemed only mildly concerning. [Written in My Own Heart's Blood, p. 97]

More crises, more war, more deaths: but also more marriages, more reunions and Lord John being awesome.

In this novel Diana Gabaldon commits fanfiction, having Lord John encounter one "Natty Bumpo ... Folks mostly call me ‘Hawkeye,’ though." James Fenimore Cooper does get a namecheck in the acknowledgements, so that's nice.

And there's more on the philosophical and scientific underpinnings of time travel. And a very cheering ending -- welcome, as the next book has not yet been published.

All in all, this trio of long novels was a (mostly) very pleasant and undemanding read. I may not like all the characters, but I do feel that I know them, and that I'm interested in their stories. The historical detail is profuse, credible and immersive. The dialogue is often witty, and the pacing kept me reading. Like Claire, though, I do wish I knew more about the history of the Revolution! (And unlike Claire, I have the internet.)

2019/64: A Tale for the Time Being -- Ruth Ozeki

"I've always thought of writing as the opposite of suicide," she said. "That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it." [p. 314]

Some time after the Japanese tsunami, a Japanese-American writer named Ruth is walking along the beach near her home in British Columbia when she discovers a plastic-wrapped Hello Kitty lunchbox containing a diary (disguised as À la recherche du temps perdu, an inscribed watch, and some old letters. The diary belonged to 16-year-old Nao (pronounced 'now'), who grew up in America but had to return to Japan with her family when the dot-com bubble burst. Nao is bullied mercilessly by her schoolmates (who even stage a funeral for her, and afterwards behave as though she is never present); her father is smothered by depression.

Ruth is a writer whose current book is stalled: she is fascinated by Nao's autobiography, and her intention of writing the biography of her great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko, who is 105 years old and a Buddhist nun. Jiko's beliefs infuse Nao's narrative: a time being, for instance, is 'someone who lives in time', and Nao spends a lot of her time considering time, wasting it, 'what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever? And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It's not like you get to die any sooner, right? I mean, if you want to die sooner, you have to take matters into your own hands' [p. 22]. Ruth can't be sure whether Nao was a victim of the tsunami, or whether she had already died -- perhaps by her own hand -- before it happened. She Googles Nao, and the humiliating video of her which apparently went viral: nothing. Did Nao ever really exist? And weren't there more pages, once, in her diary?

This is a complex and multilayered novel: about the tensions between Nao's American upbringing and her Japanese life, about her father's refusal to compromise his beliefs, about her great-grandmother's philosophy and about Jiko's son, Nao's grandfather, and his life as a scholar and then as a kamikaze pilot. Nao's first-person narrative, with its idioms and insights into Japanese pop culture, contrasts sharply with Ruth's third-person narrative. (Is Ruth the character the same person as Ruth Ozeki, author of this book?) Ruth sees Nao's story through a lens fogged by her own experiences: her mother's Alzheimers-related decline, her own difficulties with her writing, her isolation in British Columbia and the frequent, not always welcome attempts of her husband Oliver to explain Science to her. (They have a cat. It is named Schrodinger but mostly called Pest or Pesto. I don't think Ruth appreciates the cat as much as she should.)

A Tale for the Time Being takes in 9/11, the Pacific Gyre, quantum mechanics and the philosophical implications of the reader/writer relationship. It's beautifully written, powerfully affecting -- and probably a book not to be rushed through while one's stressed and unhappy. I think I'd like to read it again when life is more peaceful.

Read for rubric 'a religion other than your own' of the Reading Women 2019 challenge.

2019/63: Fire Colour One -- Jenny Valentine

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” Lowell told me once, and I had to stop myself from pouring petrol over his shoes and lighting it up right there and then. [p. 59]

Iris, with her mother Hannah and her stepfather Lowell, has returned to England to see her father Ernest, who's dying. "You and me and his millions are all he's got," says Hannah gleefully. Iris can barely remember her father; she's had a row with her best friend Thurston (who first meets Hannah dressed as, well, Hannah: nobody suspects that he's a teenage runaway and petty criminal) and can't contact him. She does not want to be uprooted from her life. Never mind the acts of arson she's committed ...

Ernest turns out to be a delightful character, under no illusions about his ex-wife but longing to reconnect with his daughter. It turns out Hannah hasn't been wholly honest with Iris: how Iris discovers this, and how Ernest circumvents Hannah's greed, is the core of the story.

Iris is a complex protagonist, and Hannah an utterly villainous antagonist. (She too has some complexity, mostly revealed in Ernest's anecdotes about their life together. ) I would have liked more Thurston, but Iris' yearning to fix things between the two of them, and her gradual realisation that she knows very little about her friend, is beautifully written.

2019/61: Daughter of Kali: Awakening -- Shiulie Ghosh

If we don’t stop them, the demons will create a permanent hellhole in two days’ time. The same night as the prom. [p. 214]

Kaz is determined to be British, never mind how much her mother clings to Indian culture. Kaz's dad isn't around, and Kaz and her mum argue a lot. They've always had an intense relationship: when she was younger, Kaz had hallucinations, brought on (according to the doctor) by the stress of being the only child of a single parent. Now, as a teenager, she's starting to see things again: mysterious shadows clustering around some people, such as the new supply teacher. And Kaz's mum.

She does not experience these hallucinations whilst looking at the new kid in school, Ed. When Kaz looks at Ed, she experiences attraction. Unfortunately so does her best friend Em.

This is a readable and well-paced novel about identity, mental illness, teenage friendship and romance, and demon-fighting. The tension between Kaz's Britishness and her otherness -- the supernatural aspects as well as her Indian ancestry -- is well-drawn, not laboured but very clear. There's a strong Hindu influence, and a council of old white blokes who need shaking up. Luckily we have just the heroine to do that.

First in a series, this novel establishes a cast of characters and sets up challenges for future books in the series.

Read for the 'YA novel by a woman of colour' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2019 on Goodreads.

2019/62: Disorganized Crime -- Alex A. King

With a dog you know where you stand. With a cat all you know is where you can't sit. [p. 44]

Kat Makris is twenty-eight, single and lives in Portland with her Greek father: she's just about to tell him that she's moving out when he disappears -- and before Kat can do more than panic, she too is abducted by persons unknown.

Kat's dad used to tell her stories about a monstrous creature known as Baboulas, known all over Greece for theft and murder and silencing the opposition. 'There were only two ways to escape Baboulas, the way he told it: death or the Witness Protection Program—and the second one was kind of iffy.' Now Kat, whisked away to Greece and confronted with a plethora of relatives that she's never met, discovers that Baboulas is not at all mythical, but horribly real: and she is going to have to face Baboulas or give up on her beloved father.

That makes this novel sound very grim, which is far from the case. There is romance, humour -- a great deal of humour, some of it not wholly appropriate to circumstances -- and a great deal of good food. (I snacked so much while reading this!) Kat is somewhat prone to leaping in where angels, and her unangelic family, fear to tread: I mean, obviously you march up to the local crime lord to demand information on your father's whereabouts, yes? (The correct answer is 'no'.) But she is constantly witty, surprisingly sensible when she needs to be, and resilient.

A light, uplifting, enjoyable read -- though be warned, there is more story to come (eight book series!), and only a few sub-plots are wrapped up in this volume, which is currently free on Kindle UK.

2019/60: National Velvet -- Enid Bagnold

From the height of the window, beyond the canary cages, the immortal Hullocks browsed, burnished and lit, at two in the afternoon. Bowed like silver barrels they were set in rows endwise to the sea. Like pigs, like sheep, like elephants, hay-blond with burnt grass. Velvet's mind stuttered like a small candle before the light and the height and the savage stillness of the middle afternoon. [p. 64]

When I read National Velvet as a child, I read it as the story of a girl who dreams of horses and whose dreams come true. Reading as an adult, I see a complex and layered story about mothers and daughters, different kinds of love, and the purity of Velvet's dream.

Initially published in 1935 -- as a novel for adults, not the children's book it was later marketed as -- National Velvet is the story of a butcher's daughter who wins a horse in the village raffle, and inherits another five from a local eccentric. She and her sisters (who are nothing like her) compete in the local gymkhana: then Velvet, in collusion with her father's assistant Mi Taylor (a young man with a mysterious past), enters the Grand National on her raffle-prize horse, disguised as a boy: and wins.

Except that there's so much more to the story. The way the actual National is described -- in glimpses through the crowd as Mi shoves and rushes towards the finish line, never sure if Velvet's still in the race -- is enough to tell us that. (I'm glad it doesn't describe the National in much detail: that race's massive equine death toll is horrific.) National Velvet is also a story about Velvet's mother Araminty, who swam the Channel as a young woman coached by Mi's dad, and who sees something of her own spirit in her youngest daughter. It's also Mi's story,a swim coach's son who can't swim and hates water, who knows horses but doesn't ride. And the story of the five children of Mr Brown the Butcher, the three golden sisters and their baby brother with the film-star looks, and Velvet who is plain and has bad teeth, growing up in poverty in rural Sussex between the wars, getting Mars bars and Crunchies on tick at the local shop, accepting that there's the ghost of a horse at a difficult corner, dreaming of horses.

(When is this novel set? It has to be, Bagnold tells us, before 1931, when the rules of the National were changed to prohibit horses without a history of steeplechase wins; but it has to be after 1930, because Velvet is described as being victim to a 'Lindbergh-Amy Johnson' sort of press frenzy, but Amy Johnson only hit the headlines with her solo flight to Australia in May 1930 ... The Past, we can safely say: the England in which my mother, a baker's daughter born in the mid-1920s, grew up.)

As always when I reread, I was surprised by what I remembered (one of the sisters getting splatted by birdshit, Araminty's corsetry, the phrase 'hands like piano wires') and what I'd forgotten or never noticed (Araminty's brief flash of panic when Velvet confides 'me and Mi are in this together', before she realises that her daughter is 'not all messed up with love an' such', but only with the love of a horse; the Russian jockey whose horse dies at Croydon airport; the fact that the Piebald was neutered late, and not terribly well, and thus is thick-necked and wilful).

There is some glorious writing here too. I'd never seen the Sussex Downs when I first read the book, and had no visual reference: but the vast loom and the empty golden hilltops resonate now, and perhaps resonated in my subconscious when I did visit that landscape.

And there are so many different kinds of love here: the wordless sexless love of Mi for Velvet and his father for her mother ('there are men who like to make something out of women'), the dog that the family loves 'as they loved each other, deeply, from the back of the soul, with intolerance in daily life', the quiet enduring love between Araminty and her rather colourless husband, the youthful passion of Edwina and her beau Teddy, Malvolia's love for her canaries: and Velvet's love for horses, and above all for the Piebald. "If you could see what he did for me ... I'd sooner have that horse happy than go to heaven," she says.

This is a book that focuses on the female characters, but doesn't gloss over the sexism of the period. Velvet couldn't have pulled off the ruse without Mi's help: she has no access to the racing circles in which he moves, and would never have been taken seriously without Mi's preparatory work. A generation earlier, Araminty's Channel swim was possible only because of Dan Taylor's coaching: and when she came to land at Calais, the press descended and (implicitly) treated her as a spectacle. Mr Brown hopes his girls will marry well: he forces Velvet to wear a painful brace so that her teeth will be respectable. The women are wasted, in a sense. Of Araminty, early on: 'it would have taken a war on her home soil, the birth of a colony, or a great cataclysm to have dug from her what she was born for'. She's glad of her daughters, for she doesn't understand the courage of men. ... Interesting to put this in context: Mr and Mrs Brown lived through the First World War, and likely thought it could never happen again. Perhaps Donald, the baby of the family, is young enough that he won't serve in the Second World War. Perhaps.

Read, via the Internet Library -- unaccountably there is no ebook edition! -- for the 'woman athlete' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2019 on Goodreads.

2019/59: Gods of Jade and Shadow -- Silvia Moreno-Garcia

“... it is a good thing I rescued you,” Hun-Kamé said.
“You did not rescue me,” Casiopea replied. “I opened that chest. Besides, I wasn’t a princess in a tower. I knew I’d get away one way or another, and I was not waiting for a god to liberate me." [loc. 720]

Casiopea Tun refuses to think of herself as a Cinderella figure: she's not a romantic. She's eighteen years old, and lives in the house of her bitter, ailing grandfather, who is punishing his daughter (and her child) for the crime of marrying an indigenous man. Now Casiopea's father is dead, and she and her mother are little more than slaves in the family house, tyrannised by the old man and by Casiopea's cousin Martín.

Then Casiopea opens the chest at the foot of her grandfather's bed, discovers a heap of white bones, and discovers that she has freed a long-imprisoned Mayan deathgod. Hun-Kamé was imprisoned by his wicked brother Vucub-Kamé, and he's determined to regain his kingdom. But first he must collect the missing parts of himself -- and Casiopea, whose blood sustains him, must accompany him on his quest.

In the small town of Uukumil, in the Yucatan peninsula, it might as well be 1807 -- but the outside world is changing. It's 1927, the Jazz Age is in full swing, and Mexico is in the grip of social, religious and political revolutions. And as for America ...

I found the style of this novel somewhat distancing. The narrative is consciously telling a story, describing the emotions of the characters and the broader context of their actions rather than presenting them as the characters' experiences. Casiopea is a likeable heroine, though, with dry wit and a pragmatic sensibility. The gradual humanisation of Hun-Kamé was delicately sketched, and the finale very satisfactory.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing a free advance copy in exchange for this review!