2021/116: The Naturalist -- Andrew Mayne

I have to remind myself this isn’t some professional dispute in a journal over the results of a research paper. Two girls were murdered, and maybe many, many more. My goal is simply truth. I have to take my ego out of this. [p. 167]

There are more than enough femicides in the news, so why read fictional versions? I tend to avoid novels about serial killers who prey on young women, yet I did find The Naturalist readable, well-plotted and surprisingly sympathetic. To be fair, I made an incorrect assumption based on the sample chapters -- I thought the Big Bad would be supernatural -- and by the time I realised I was wrong, I'd been drawn into the story, and intrigued by the character of Professor Theo Cray, computational biologist and social misfit. Theo has been trained to spot patterns in chaos, and he is adept at applying the scientific method (and a comprehensive knowledge of biology, botany, ecology and geology) to the world around him. Not so adept at dealing with people ("What was I supposed to say when he mentioned her name? How was my face supposed to move? I don’t know." [p. 37]) and with some quite old-fashioned ideas, or perhaps unquestioned instincts, regarding women.

It's the usual thing: maverick lone wolf finds something that all the professionals have missed; he (or she) is mocked and ignored, but ultimately proven right, though not without idiosyncratic acts of heroism, a few broken laws, a couple of dead ends and one or more unnecessarily dead bodies. What made this murder mystery unusually interesting, for me, was Cray's use of science to unravel the case. He spots burial sites because of the mix of plants growing there; he recognises a predator's circuit in the pattern of crimes; he develops an algorithm to identify comparable murders, and observes that it's not that accurate -- it's just that there are many more murders than anyone has realised.

I found Cray annoying at times, but that was, I think, because of some aspects of his character: he doesn't score highly on empathy, in the sense of understanding how his actions might appear to others, and his attitude to women he finds attractive is, by his own admission, somewhat chauvinistic. But I liked him, and Mayne's prose, enough to acquire the next in the series.

2021/115: What Abigail Did That Summer -- Ben Aaronovitch

We still don’t know where the talking foxes come from, what they think they’re up to, or why they’re up in my business. I gave one half a Greggs sausage roll once. Maybe they imprinted. [loc. 419]

A fun novella focussing on Abigail's adventures on Hampstead Heath: it's set in the summer of 2013, when Peter Grant is off in Herefordshire being menaced by unicorns, and though it doesn't really add anything to the main Rivers of London arc, it does establish Abigail as a competent, savvy and likeable young woman.

Teenagers are going missing, but only for a couple of nights, and without any physical or psychological damage apart from mild amnesia. Abigail is convinced the disappearances are connected. She begins to investigate, with the help of her new friend Simon and a shadowy organisation of talking foxes who are accomplished spies and detectives, and have picked up London slang from ... somewhere.

The foxes are awesome, and so is Abigail. She's a complex character with a difficult family life and enough courage and curiosity to make her a formidable wizard when she's older. And she takes a lot of weirdness in her stride, unlike Peter in the early books. This was a cheering read for a rainy Saturday, with Discworld and Hitchhiker's references and a sharp eye for London street life: I hope we'll get more Abigail from Aaronovitch.

Shout-out to Harold Postmartin's explicatory footnotes on London street slang. I was charmed.

2021/114: Seducing the Sorcerer -- Lee Welch

...who was to say that worple horses didn’t eat pink silk eiderdowns? Whatever a worple horse was. [loc. 729]

Fenn Todd scrapes a living doing odd jobs for whoever'll employ him. He has no home, and very little hope. He still dreams of the horses he cared for on the estate where he grew up. When a loutish chap in a fancy embroidered jerkin offers him a horse of his own in exchange for digging a cesspit, of course Fenn jumps at the chance. But it's a cruel trick, because the 'horse' is a sad-looking affair of sacking and stuffing.

And there's a glowing rune on its chest, and it keeps following him.

Fenn finds himself a guest of the Court Sorcerer, Morgrim, who rumour claims is responsible for the drought that grips the country. Certainly it rains ceaselessly at Unket Tower, where Morgrim dwells. Evidence suggests that Morgrim is a black-dyed villain: but Fenn, much to his own surprise, finds the man charming, companionable and extremely attractive. Can he trust his feelings, though, in a place so beset with spells and hexes?

This is a warm-hearted romance with an ambience that reminded me of Diana Wynne Jones' works, especially Howl's Moving Castle. The world-building, though never the focus, is splendid: the rise of crystal-powered 'horseless carriages' and velocipedes; Morgrim's desire to abolish the monarchy, wholeheartedly supported by young Queen Aramella. I found Fenn's love and appreciation for horses truly moving, and I liked his distinctive narrative voice, which felt credibly rural and uneducated without making him seem unintelligent. Though at least some of Fenn and Morgrim's issues could have been resolved by better communication, neither has had much in the way of close relationships for many years: some reserve, some over-hasty assumption, is excusable. And I did like the fact that they were both in their forties, far past the first flush of youth.

2021/113: Mr Cadmus -- Peter Ackroyd

‘May I offer you a glass of sherry, Mr Cadmus? Or wine perhaps?’
‘We will drink our fill of golden sunshine. One of your national poets tells us this.’
‘I’m afraid I only have a Beaujolais from Tesco.' [p. 6]

Devon, 1981: two unmarried cousins, Maud Finch and Millicent Swallow, inhabit the end houses of a three-cottage terrace. The ladies are understandably alarmed when a Foreigner (easily identified by his yellow sportscar, green trousers and red sweater) moves into the middle house. However, the mysterious yet charming Mr Cadmus -- for it is he -- soon wins them over with chocolates, compliments and polite flirtation, and in turn the ladies introduce him to the social whirl of Lower Camborne. Unfortunately his arrival coincides with a string of alarming incidents, including an armed robbery at the Post Office, the abrupt departure of the vicar Anthony 'call me Tony' Beaumont, a murder or two ...

This short novel never quite gelled for me, perhaps because I was expecting something weirder. There were hints of the supernatural, and of an ambience suggestive of magic realism, but the actual story -- revenge for a crime committed during the war, tempered with a sharp satire on rural life in the early 1980s -- was depressingly mundane, and never quite resolved itself. A disappointment: I loved Ackroyd's early novels, and intend to reread them once they're available as ebooks (I have no idea why they haven't been published in this format), but this doesn't compare favourably.

2021/112: The Poppy War -- R F Kuang

"...You’ve brought down forces you don’t understand into your pathetic little material world, and your world would be infinitely more interesting if someone smashed it up for a bit.” [p. 464]

Rin is a war orphan, effectively a slave to her foster family: to avoid an arranged marriage and escape a life of poverty and oppression, she studies for the Empire's Keju test, which promises admission to the academies -- and she passes with flying colours. Her admission to the elite Sinegard academy brings its own challenges: in this respect, The Poppy War is a typical school story. Rin makes friends and enemies, clashes with teachers, discovers that she has hidden talents or gifts (in this case, shamanic powers), and is determined to use them and thus prove herself, despite her mentor warning her of the dangers.

Then it all goes grimdark, and there are some deeply unpleasant and upsettingly graphic descriptions of genocide, torture and desecration. It's easy to read Rin as monstrous, even if the reasons she has become -- or been made -- a monster are sympathetically depicted. The worldbuilding (and especially the theology) is interesting, as is Rin's character arc, but I found the increasing brutality, and the sheer misery, alienating, and I'm disinclined to read the rest of the series.

Fulfils the 'A Fantasy Novel by an Asian Author' prompt of the Reading Women Challenge 2021.

2021/111: Invisible Women -- Caroline Criado Perez

Routinely forgetting to accommodate the female body in design – whether medical, technological or architectural – has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women to navigate. [loc. 5423]

The physical differences between men's bodies and women's bodies are not the only inequalities which Perez discusses. There are three major themes in this book: the female body, women's unpaid care burden, and male violence against women. I was most interested in the 'female body' content, as it introduced me to some fascinating data that I hadn't previously encountered. I did not know, for instance, that there is a safe, effective treatment for period pain -- something that plagued me for decades despite nurofen, codeine, mefenamic acid -- already on the market. It grants 'total pain relief over 4 consecutive hours’, with ‘no observed adverse effects’. Unfortunately it is marketed to men: it's Viagra.

I also did not know that 'cells differ according to sex irrespective of their history of exposure to sex hormones': for example, muscle-stem cells transplanted from a male donor won't regenerate in the way that cells from a female donor will. (I found this fascinating and weird: my further reading is noted at the end of this review.)

A lot of the book, with its relentless onslaught of figures, covered familiar territory, even if I wasn't aware of the specific data. As a woman at the lower end of the height curve, I am all too accustomed to a world designed for people taller, stronger and with a different distribution of fat and muscle. I have experienced sexism in every area of life, and am constantly aware of my physical vulnerability and the risk I take by being in possession of a female body in public. The only reason I don't have an unpaid care burden is because I am, in sociological parlance, 'unencumbered' by care responsibilities.

But I can still be enraged by the ways in which female experience is ignored, discounted or deprioritised. I was fascinated (and furious) by Perez' account of how female farming practices are dismissed: "Hoeing can be easily started and stopped, meaning that it can be combined with childcare. The same cannot be said for a heavy tool drawn by a powerful animal....female farmers in this area didn’t see yields as the most important thing. They cared about other factors like how much land preparation and weeding these crops required, because these are female jobs. And they cared about how long, ultimately, the crops would take to cook (another female job)." [loc 2650-2735] The perils of bias in voice recognition systems: "a woman who had bought a 2012 Ford Focus, only to find that its voice-command system only listened to her husband, even though he was in the passenger seat" [2922]. I wonder about statistics like this one: "among men and women who smoke the same number of cigarettes, women are 20–70% more likely to develop lung cancer" [3450] and how different the anti-smoking campaign might have been if the propensity had been reversed.

The book does present gender, and biological sex, as a binary. I don't think it aims to erase trans, nonbinary, intersex experience, but it certainly doesn't focus on them. Regarding 'the female body', I found it useful to mentally translate this as 'bodies assigned female at birth' (AFAB): while there are distinct differences between AFAB bodies and AMAB bodies, not all AFAB bodies belong to women, just as not all AMAB bodies belong to men.

This book made me very angry. It was refreshing, informative and infuriating. And it is extremely well referenced, for anyone wishing to read more on any of Perez' statements.

• Cell Sex Matters [Nature]
• Genes express differently

Fulfils the 'A Nonfiction Book Focused on Social Justice' prompt of the Reading Women Challenge 2021.

2021/110: Out, Proud and Prejudiced -- Megan Reddaway

Darius looked him up and down and said, "Just about fuckable, I suppose, but hardly up to my standards." [p. 13]

M/M modern AU of Pride and Prejudice. Bennet Rourke is a hospitality student: Darius Lanniker is a wealthy lawyer, slumming it with his friend Tim who's just bought an art gallery in Meriton. Tim falls in love with Bennet's housemate Jamie, but Bennet and Darius -- despite a frisson of sexual attraction between them, and a shared interest in rock-climbing -- do not get along. Bennet would rather hang out with Darius's stepbrother, Wyndham, and support his friends when drama strikes. Only gradually does he revisit his prejudices and assumptions, and realise that Darius is not the villain here.

This was fun, though there were a few plot threads that seemed to be left dangling (Bennet's family, for instance), and some characters who could have been more developed. I enjoyed spotting the parallels between this and Austen, and I like the way in which Reddaway kept the essential plot while giving it a thoroughly modern setting. Perhaps the enormity of Wyndham's crimes has, after all, the impact that Wickham's behaviour would have had in Austen's time -- though Wyndham is considerably more destructive to more people.

2021/109: The Governess Affair -- Courtney Milan

In her memory of that night, her own silence mocked her most of all. She hadn’t screamed, and because she hadn’t, she’d felt silent ever since. [p. 25]

Serena Barton lost her position as a governess after being turned off for 'immoral behaviour'. The behaviour in question involved the Duke of Clermont, who raped her: now she is pregnant, without hope of employment, and dependent on her judgemental, agoraphobic sister Freddy for a place to live. She decides to picket sit quietly outside the Duke's London residence until he compensates her, or until her presence sparks a scandal that destroys his precarious marriage.

The Duke, who is a coward as well as a sexual predator, sends his man of business, Hugo Marshall -- popularly known as the Wolf of Clermont -- to deal with Miss Barton. Hugo, who is horribly competent at making problems go away, deals with Miss Barton in an escalating series of creative attacks, and then seals the deal by falling in love with, and marrying, her.

Despite the past sexual assault, and the Duke's moral vapidity, this is a sweet and cheering novella. Serena's rape is not described in detail, and Hugo (even before he realises what has happened to Serena) is extremely careful not to appear physically threatening. I especially liked the notes they wrote to one another, Serena in the square and Hugo in his office ... and the way in which Milan wrote the sex scene, in which Hugo treats Serena with respect as well as creativity. And the ending, in which the Duke gets his come-uppance, was profoundly satisfying.

2021/108: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead -- Olga Togarcsuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

When you kill [animals], and they die in Fear and Terror – like that Boar whose body lay before me yesterday, and is still lying there, defiled, muddied and smeared with blood, reduced to carrion – you doom them to hell, and the whole world changes into hell. [p. 106]

Midwinter in a small Polish village, near the Czech border. Janina Duszejko is woken in the middle of the night by the neighbour she calls Oddball: together, they discover the corpse of another neighbour (Big Foot) who has been murdered. This is the first of several violent deaths in the village. The victims are all male, and have all hunted for sport. Could the animals be taking their revenge?

Janina is a delight, as a narrator and as a character. She is eccentric, opinionated, and well-educated; passionate about animal rights, an introvert with a few close relationships; a former bridge engineer and teacher who enjoys translating the poems of William Blake, and draws up horoscopes to better understand the world and the people in it; a practical woman who lives alone, despite ill health and old age ("I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night"). Her narrative offers insight into the ways that elderly women, especially single women, are treated, and into the strategems she's developed to exploit her situation. She is witty, fierce and principled. I felt as though I could hear her telling me the tale: I felt as though we could be friends.

2021/107: To Glory Arise -- Walter Jon Williams

Privateering was not a profession for a man who held ultrafine scruples, but Malachi had hoped that the American breed would somehow be better than others, that fighting for a just cause could inspire a more upstanding brand of warfare than that inspired by tyranny. [loc. 3841]

First novel by Walter Jon Williams: not SF or fantasy, but naval, set during the American War of Independence, and written as a tie-in to the RPG Privateers and Gentlemen.

I doubt I would have stuck with this if I hadn't been reading it for book club: the opening chapters are clunky, with a lot of repetition and a sex scene that includes the phrase 'willing breasts'. It does improve a bit after that, though. The first chapters introduce the three Markham brothers -- Jehu (the one educated in England), Josiah (the religious one) and Malachi (the fun one) -- and much of the rest of the novel focusses on Malachi and his privateering adventures. There are a lot of gory naval battles (mostly against the perfidious English) but Malachi nevertheless finds time to fall in love with an English lady, Georgina, whose probing questions about his future plans can only mean that she reciprocates his feelings. Oh, wait ...

There are too many infodumps, not enough depth of character, and so much repetition that I wondered if To Glory Arise had been published in a rush, without thorough editing. I was also deeply unimpressed with the end of the novel, in which a major character is killed off in a single sentence. If I hadn't already known from his other work that Williams is an accomplished and inventive author, this novel would have convinced me not to read anything else by him.

I am, of course, spoilt by having read Patrick O'Brian at an early age: and now I want to reread some, as a palate cleanser.

2021/106: The Only Plane in the Sky -- Garrett M Graff

I saw glass—lots of glass—in the sky. It was really bright out, and it was reflecting off the glass and the sky. Light shimmering everywhere. [loc. 711]

What I remember most about September 11, 2001, is how incredibly alone I felt. I lived alone; I couldn't get in touch with any of my friends; I didn't have TV, and this was years before Twitter, so I sat at the computer hitting refresh on the BBC website, nauseated by the photos and the reports, aware that the world was changing. As it turned out, it was several years before I saw film of the planes crashing into the towers.

I bought and read this book because I wanted to disentangle the facts, the lived experience, from my own emotional response. The Only Plane in the Sky is entirely composed of first-person accounts from hundreds of people: an astronaut on the ISS; a high-school student whose yearbook photo was taken just after she heard the news; the mayor's communications director ('I was facing what I thought would be an easy day'); a USAF pilot who was preparing to ram the hijacked planes, because she didn't have weapons; an office worker who survived in the rubble for 27 hours; many, many firefighters. I was struck by the immediacy, the subjectivity and the sheer randomness of what people focussed on. There is heroism here, and tremendous tragedy, suffering, death: but there are also surreal moments, vivid images that have stuck in memory: the aeroplane engine come to rest in a jacuzzi, the rhythmic sound of girders snapping as the plane crashed into the tower, the motion-sensor doors whooshing open and closed as debris (and worse) fell.

It was oddly cathartic to read this on the twentieth anniversary of the attacks. Now, of course, everything's there online: news footage, the 9/11 Commission Report, a number of films ... Still, I remember my own misery that night, and wish I had not endured it alone.

It felt good to be amongst friends if for no other reason than to remind me that I wasn’t the only person who had no idea what to think, feel, or do. [loc. 6353]

2021/105: Children of the Storm -- Elizabeth Peters

The plot would do nicely for a sensational novel, but it is all based on surmise. [loc. 298]

The Great War is over, and the extended Emerson family -- now including Amelia and Emerson's grandchildren, as well as a number of friends and associates -- return to Egypt to excavate at Luxor. Unfortunately they are plagued by accidents and misfortune, but that's surely coincidence, isn't it?

An Italian conservation expert goes missing. There are rumours of a mysterious apparition, and Ramses has an odd encounter with a 'goddess' in a Cairo tenement: some of Cyrus Vandergelt's precious discoveries go missing, and Amelia receives a cryptic warning, in a dream, from Abdullah. 'Watch over the children,' he advises: but which children?

It really is a complicated plot, with aliases and deceptions and disguises, and the denouement is as dramatic as anything that's befallen the family before. (The focus in this novel is much more on the family than on the archaeology.) All's well in the end though, and an ancient mystery (all right, not that ancient: Sethos' true name) is revealed. Also, a tantalising conclusion ...

I am saving the remaining two (I think) novels in the series for when I need more comfort reading. Hopefully not too soon!

2021/104: In the Empty Quarter -- G Willow Wilson

Jean almost told him she’d never before thought of an Arab as being ‘well-bred’, but she stopped before the words left her mouth, silently pleased by her own sensitivity. [loc. 120]

Set in 1952 in the Rub' al-Khali desert, near the Persian Gulf. Jean's husband Harold is an oil company executive: Jean is bored out of her mind, sneeringly dismissive of the other company wives, and cultivating an affair with Masoud, who's the cousin of a prince. She is allowed to accompany Harold and Masoud on a desert survey: disregarding Masoud's warnings, she falls into a cave and is trapped by a rockslide. Which is the least of her worries.

Jean is an unlikeable character, though she has imagination and a streak of romanticism which soften her sharp edges a little. It's likely that by the end of this short story (barely a novella) she has become somewhat less racist, a little more mature: I'd have liked an afterword to hint at what happens next. But this is a well-structured and nicely layered tale, and I am reminded that I enjoyed Wilson's debut novel (Alif the Unseen) and would like to read her latest, The Bird King.

2021/103: The Golden One -- Elizabeth Peters

Men actually enjoy this sort of thing! So do I, if truth be told, but only when I am allowed to take an active part. [p. 383]

Egypt in 1917, under the shadow of the Great War. In Luxor, Amelia and Emerson encounter Joe Albion, a wealthy American collector who is perfectly happy to purchase antiquities on the black market. Their former employee Jamil may be dealing with Albion, and certainly seems to know the location of a secret, unexcavated tomb... Meanwhile, Ramses has been tasked with a mission to Gaza to investigate a possible double agent. Could it be Sethos? And is the mission actually as straightforward as it seems? (These are rhetorical questions.)

Plenty of swashbuckling here, plus a thrilling expedition across the desert in a T Model Ford Light, some inventive disguises, and vignettes of the ways in which the war has affected the Middle East, including the opportunities it has afforded women. An enjoyable and well-paced read.