2023/124: Midnight Crossroad — Charlaine Harris

Manfred was not a mind-reader, at least not consistently or casually, but he’d been trained to be observant. [p. 192]

Readers who are already Charlaine Harris fans seem to give this novel negative reviews. I haven't read the author's other series, so have come to this fresh, and I enjoyed it a lot: cozy(ish) crime; small town with fascinating characters, all of whom have (mostly supernatural) secrets; complex interpersonal relationships; a setting that I picture as similar to Wes Anderson's Asteroid City; white supremacists getting their comeupance; an excellent cat.

Manfred Bernardo, who runs several online / phone psychic businesses, moves to quiet Midnight, Texas. His landlord is Bobo Winthrop, who runs the pawnshop at the crossroads; Bobo's girlfriend Aubrey is missing, presumed to have left him. Manfred is welcomed into the community, such as it is: a mysterious nocturnal fellow who lives in the basement of the pawnshop; his deadly-but-beautiful lover; the gay couple who run the Antique Gallery and Nail Salon; the Black woman who cooks at, and owns, the Home Cookin diner; the teenage kids of the guy who runs the garage and mini-mart; the Reverend, who only speaks when he has something to say; and Fiji, who lives across the highway from Manfred with her cat Mr Snuggley and her collection of witchcraft paraphernalia. Harris is to be commended for the subtlety with which she reveals her characters' secrets -- some of them, anyway. Tragically I will have to read the other novels in the trilogy to discover more!

Could easily have filled a prompt or two for Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 03 NOV 2017.

2023/123: A Hundred Summers — Beatriz Williams

I am walking into a Gramercy apartment with a man not my husband, on New Year’s Eve. Champagne still courses illegally through my veins, and my dress glitters beneath my mink coat. [p. 196]

In 1931 Lily and her best friend Budgie go to a football match and meet Graham Pendleton and Nick Greenwald. All come from wealthy New England families, and move in the same circles. Budgie and Graham pair up, Lily and Nick pair up: all is idyllic, though Budgie warns Lily that Nick will never be fully accepted, as he's a Jew.

Fast-forward to 1938, when Lily -- hoping to enjoy a summer by the sea with her aunt, her mother and little Kiki, who's six -- encounters Budgie and Nick again. Her former best friend and former fiance are now married to one another, and Lily has to put on a brave face for Kiki, and for all the people who've known her since childhood. Graham, Budgie's ex, is on the scene too, and Lily finds herself the target of his attentions.

The narrative switches back and forth between the two periods. 1931 Lily is 21, glamorous, innocent: 1938 Lily lives quietly, with Kiki as the centre of her life. She doesn't know about the rumours, and nobody seems willing to tell her the truth ...

Some great characters (though not the protagonists: Lily is dangerously naive, Budgie is a sociopath) and a lovely sense of time and place, but it doesn't quite add up to a good novel. I'm perplexed by Lily's memories of the time when her father was away at war -- must've been WW1, in which case she was eight years old when he came home with permanent damage, yet she'd already taken over firing a signal cannon? And the title, which refers to the hurricane at the climax of the book -- 'New England hurricanes of that magnitude [are called] hundred-year storms, because the probability of such a disaster occurring in any one year is roughly 1 percent. We had not yet seen a hundred summers since the hurricane of 1938...' [author's afterword, p. 355] -- but has no meaning for the characters, and no relevance to the events of the novel.

Just desserts all round, after a plethora of lies and sordid behaviour (including date rape, adultery, sexual abuse...): I liked the atmosphere and setting, but not the plot.

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 03 SEP 2016, prompt 'beautiful cover'. It's a cover I want to live in: not enough beach time this summer!

2023/122: A Street Cat Named Bob — James Bowen

It was one of the biggest changes that Bob had brought with him. Thanks to him I’d rediscovered the good side of human nature. I had begun to place my trust - and faith - in people again. [p. 186]

James Bowen was drug-dependent (methadone), busking for money, trying to get by in London. Bob was injured, homeless, and a cat. They adopted one another and cared for one another and both had better lives through their friendship. That's a quick summary of a straightforward, simply written and emotionally satisfying book. It made me (a) go and hug my own rescued cat (b) remember a friend's encounter with Bob and James -- possibly around the time this book was first published, as her partner came home with a copy of it while she was recounting her experience.

Bob sounds like an exceptional cat: happy to wear a harness, self-taught user of human toilets, able to navigate over a mile through Islington to a place he'd only been once. And James' determination to be a better person just for his cat made me very happy. "Someone said to me once that we were the reincarnation of Dick Whittington and his cat. Except the roles had been reversed this time around, Dick Whittington had come back as Bob - and I was his companion. I didn’t have a problem with that. I was happy to think of him in that way. Bob is my best mate and the one who has guided me towards a different - and a better - way of life." [p. 274].

Fulfils the ‘Turned into a Movie or TV Series’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

Could have been for Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 01 AUG 2017.

2023/121: Hopeland — Ian McDonald

We don’t look at time right. We’re chronologically lopsided. We can think about millions of years in the past but not millions of years in the future. We can think about the age of the dinosaurs, or the Romans, but we can’t push our minds two thousand years ahead, let alone millions... We can think about the time when we were not, but we can’t think about the time when we will not be. [loc. 1726]

Hopeland begins in Soho during the London riots of 2011 and ends in Greenland in 2033. Or perhaps in Eirin (once Ireland) in 2981. Or perhaps it does not end.

Amon Brightbourne is a particular kind of composer, his creations a mosaic of found sound and samples, tailored for an audience of one. In the summer of 2011 he's trying to find the gig he's meant to be playing at, but instead he meets Raisa Peri Antares Hopeland, a member of Hopeland, which is 'a nation within all nations, a religion with no belief, a family with no marriage': effectively, a non-geographic nation. Raisa is competing with another Hopelander, Finn, to find a mystical artifact, which turns out to be a gigantic Tesla coil: whoever brings it to life will become an Arcmage, an Electromancer. Amon is captivated, even before Raisa introduces him to Hopeland: but when Raisa visits Brightbourne itself and discovers the secret of Amon's improbable luck -- his Grace -- she flees.

Raisa heads north, to Iceland; Amon heads south, to Ava'u, a Polynesian island group (where, a century before, the founder of Hopeland began to think about self-selecting families.) There he plays music, meets princesses, and encounters the redoubtable Kimmie Pangaimotu. Amon's life is one of quiet melancholy, until reality crashes into him in the form of Hurricane Velma. Ava'u becomes a climate-orphaned nation on the move, and it heads north -- with, in a uniquely McDonald flourish, its ancient gods in tow, tethered by a weather balloon.

Which is nothing like all of the story, but enough to give you a taste of its blend of steampunk, fantasy and climate-crisis SF. Only a taste, because there is so much here: William Blake and Peter Ackroyd; volcanos and constellations; the KLF and a musical composition that lasts a thousand years; the Hopeland kids that don't have a gender until they're ready to choose and the fakaleiti Kimmie who's chosen a gender at odds with the sex she was assigned at birth; ephemeral enthusiasms and deep time; and storms, storms everywhere, tropical and Arctic, stronger by the year.

Climate change is real.

It took me a while to appreciate the balance between Amon, with his Grace, and Raisa the Unfinisher. (Despite one element of the conclusion, I'm not convinced that Finn is an equal part of the balance.) Amon and Raisa, between them, create a possible future that's more hopeful than anyone in the earlier chapters of the novel could reasonably expect: and in the final chapter, 'All is Full of Love', we see the fullness of the world(s) they have brought into being. Not alone -- it takes a nation -- but not without them.

The future described in this novel is not always bright, but Hopeland finds joy even in the darkest of times. McDonald's prose is often exuberant, sometimes lyrical, and has as many registers as the perpetuum mobile of Brightbourne's Music. I loved this novel and found it tremendously cheering. You can see for centuries from here, and the view is a delight.

2023/120: The Year of the Fruit Cake: or Aliens with Irony — Gillian Polack

I know I don’t have a death stare in my real body (at least I think I know) but they should have given me one for my human suit. It would be very helpful for days like this. Experiencing statistics personally is an utterly vile thing. [p. 101]

The premise is simple: humanity is being Judged. The narrators are less simple: an alien technician and an alien anthropologist, both disguised as menopausal human women. The eponymous fruitcake is explained thus: '“Armageddon” is too long and ugly. “Collapse of all we hold dear” is too depressing and too long and not quite right. “Damn humans” is accurate, but doesn’t really describe an event in English, which is a strangely limited language. I might call it “fruitcake”.' [p. 33]. The result: a novel about female friendship, ageing, predestiny, corruption, amnesia and chocolate, set in Canberra in 2016.

The Year of the Fruit Cake: or Aliens with Irony a difficult novel to review without spoilers, especially since I'm not completely sure that I've understood the various identities correctly. I do understand that both the alien narrators, of different species, are accustomed to bodies that transition between multiple genders. ("We’ve all been slotted into female bodies... within a small range of ages that cover perimenopause... This is what is considered closest to our natural state back home... None of us are males because males transform even less than females, and none of us can live without our transformations." [p. 122]) One (or both) of the narrators is partly impervious to the 'mindwipe' which should suppress their original memories and selves, and enable them to live completely immersed in human society. One (or both) is suspicious of the gaps in their memories of Earth-life, which may have been cobbled together from a variety of sources including 'Meet Me in St Louis'. One (or both) has fallen in love as a human. One (or both) appreciates the importance of good chocolate. Both narrators understand that humanity is to be Judged for making Earth uninhabitable. But who is the Judge?

This novel is often very funny, sometimes quite depressing, but ultimately hopeful. The group of five women -- Diana, Trina, Antoinette, Janet and Leanne -- are at the core of the novel, and their consideration and love for one another is a good balance to the disrespect they encounter, the sense of being invisible, the helplessness, the rage. They treat one another with care: there's enough harshness in the world. And these five women hold the key to humanity's fate: which pleases me a great deal, as does The Year of the Fruit Cake overall.

My problem with writing about humans is that, in order to write about one, I virtually have to become one. [p. 25]

2023/119: Medusa's Sisters — Lauren J A Bear

We had entered the age of heroes, and we were beasts. [loc. 4449]

Debut novel Medusa's Sisters tells the story of Stheno and Euryale, the Gorgons who were not murdered by Perseus, from their youth as beautiful immortals (the snake-hair came later) to the death of mortal Medusa, and the different ways in which Stheno and Euryale grieve and endure. Other myths are woven into their stories: they spend time with Semele, and witness the tragic fate of a mortal who loves a god; they travel to Athens, where they meet Ligeia, a female musician who is perhaps the most vividly-drawn character in the novel; they flee from Athene's rage to Sarpedon, an isle in the furthest west, where Euryale bears a child.

The story is told in two voices: Stheno's first-person narration, measured and poetic and full of rage, and a third-person account of Euryale's actions. Euryale, I fear, is hard to warm to: she is secretive and full of envy, and it's she who inadvertently sows the seeds of her sister's demise. Euryale has her own agenda, and she does not share it with her sisters. Not that Medusa doesn't keep secrets of her own...

Semele burns, Medusa is raped, Euryale is monstered: but this is not only a novel about the perils, and the power imbalance, of relationships with the Olympians. Medusa's Sisters also deals with the ways in which women (mortal and immortal) are complicit in these inequalities. Victim-blaming Athene punishes the victim, not her attacker; Euryale's envy leads her to betray a goddess' secret; Stheno dedicates her life to her sisters, leaving nothing for herself.

I liked Bear's prose (especially Stheno's voice) and the ways in which she wove the Gorgons' stories into the wider canon of Greek mythology. There were points where the pacing seemed uneven, and I think I would have preferred to have Euryale's first-person narrative rather than a less intimate third-person account: perhaps this would have rendered her more likeable, or at least more relatable. True, she doesn't have an easy time of it, but out of the three she seems to suffer least ... unless you count her envy and sullenness.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 12 SEP 2023.

2023/118: Unnatural Causes — Dr Richard Shepherd

...the awful collision between the silent, unfeeling dead and immensity of feeling they generate in the living. [loc. 782]

Dr Richard Shepherd is one of the leading forensic pathologists in the UK: this account of his career, and his life, is a rivetting read. I found it amusing -- and terribly sad -- that he spent decades performing post-mortems, and being exposed to all manner of horrific deaths, before acknowledging that his job might have 'emotional repercussions'. That realisation is triggered by a panic attack he suffers while flying a small plane over Hungerford: the massacre there was one of his first big cases. He also recounts his experiences with the sinking of the Marchioness; the Clapham train crash; the murders of Rachel Nickell and Stephen Lawrence, amongst many others; various cases of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; and the death of Joy Gardner, asphyxiated by a gag during a police immigration raid. This latter case prompted Shepherd to become involved in reviews of how restraints are used, their increased risk for sickle-cell trait sufferers, and training recommendations for those who use them. It's clear that he has been in a position to recommend changes in several areas, but in later chapters he decries the demise of forensic pathology, both as a discipline and as a career. Nowadays, apparently, it's all zero-hours, contract-based, with very little opportunity for research, or for public work such as disaster planning.

What made the book so interesting to me was the blend of insights into high-profile cases (many of which I remember, some of which personally affected me) and Shepherd's gradual insight into his own mental and emotional state. He documents the emotional distance of his first marriage, and his pride in being able to keep his feelings under control; he describes the death of his mother when he was nine years old, and his bewilderment about what he was expected to be feeling. Part of his problem (and his PTSD) was, perhaps, the toxic culture of 'alpha males' in which he spent the first decades of his professional life. Showing 'weakness' (such as vomitting at an autopsy) was mocked: shock or distress was not to be admitted.

If I forget everything else about this book (which seems unlikely, but: ageing) I hope I shall hold onto Shepherd's conclusion that 'death itself is probably actually pleasurable' {loc. 2071].

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 30 MAR 2019, prompt 'review a book'. Yes, I review everything, but this one didn't fit any other prompts!

2023/117: The Death I Gave Him — Em X. Liu

Horatio finally understands the horror of your body being only a body, a fleshy, visceral thing that you are made up of, this fatigued puppet, this breaking vessel... Horatio wonders: what does revenge mean, to a body? [loc. 2900]

The tag for this novel is 'a lyrical, queer sci-fi retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet as a locked-room thriller', which removes much of the suspense for anyone familiar with the original tragedy. Instead of wondering who the murderer is, we wonder how, and why.

The setting is Elsinore Labs, in August 2047, and the novel opens with Horatio (the AI controlling the labs) discovering broken glass, a pool of blood, a cooling corpse. Dr Graham Lichfield is dead, and his son Hayden is kneeling beside the body. Two hours of records -- cameras, audio, lab accesses -- are missing from Horatio's records, and Hayden fears that someone has killed his father to obtain the Sisyphus Formula. His uncle Charles orders a lockdown of the lab: Hayden is determined to discover the murder by fair means or foul, and he has a captive audience.

The plot beats of Hamlet are all here, ingeniously reimagined for the science-fictional setting (the ghost is a wholly scientific phenomenon, a human trial of the Sisyphus Formula) and often transformed. Felicia Xia, Hayden's ex, has considerably more agency than Ophelia, and survives to give her perspective on the events; the relationship between Horatio and Hayden -- which is at the heart of this novel, and more truly tragic than the murder of Hayden's father -- is unique, surprising and beautifully written. And Liu's background in biochemistry is evident in their prose, with some of the most lyrical passages describing the gross physicality of bodies.

I didn't really engage with The Death I Gave Him, though I admire the style and the innovation. I didn't feel that the framing narrative (a history student's retelling of 'that fateful night', collating official sources and neuromapper logs, and imploring us to 'read between the lines') was foregrounded enough. The world outside the lab, both at the time of the murder and at the (considerably later) time of that framing narrative, is very thinly sketched: catastrophic storms, pandemics... And I didn't especially like, or relate to, any of the characters, except perhaps Horatio -- the inhuman AI with more humanity than most of the other protagonists. Hayden's depression and anxiety is just as annoying as the original Hamlet's!

An ingenious transformative work, beautifully written, with a poignant romance at heart: my lukewarm reaction is likely to be another case of 'right book, wrong time'.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review. UK publication date is 12th September 2023.

2023/116: Golden Age — Naomi Novik

'Your uncle is an aviator, I understand,' Miss Caroline Bingley said to Elizabeth...
"He is," Elizabeth said, and added with a little pardonable malice, "We have several officers, in our family." She had endured a great deal of hissed whispers from her mother ... on the need for secrecy, and the deadly danger to her sisters' reputation if her own profession should become known to the company. [loc. 1066]

A collection of short stories with accompanying artwork, set in Novik's 'Temeraire' universe. I hadn't been aware of this volume before, and was dismayed to see that it was only available as a high-priced hardcover: but lovely Subterranean Press have issued it in ebook format, which I snapped up after attending the author's talk at Waterstones Piccadilly.

The stories in Golden Age are variable in length and, to me, interest. There are some that could easily be part of the Temeraire canon, and others which I think can justifiably be termed 'AU' -- that is, alternate universes. These include my two favourite tales. In 'Golden Age', Temeraire's egg is not captured by HMS Reliant, but instead hatches on a deserted beach somewhere in the Caribbean. The newborn dragon names himself Celeste, finds some friends, and embarks upon a career of piracy -- until the Admiralty despatches one Captain Laurence to deal with the threat to shipping (and also with a kraken). My other favourite is 'Dragons and Decorum', a pitch-perfect Austen pastiche in which one Elizabeth Bennet becomes captain to a Longwing named Wollstonecraft, who does not take kindly to her dear Elizabeth being described as 'tolerable' by Mr Darcy. The story covers the events of Victory of Eagles, though with a very different ambience.

The artwork, even on Kindle, is excellent: various artists have provided art, which Novik has used as the basis for the stories. There are familiar characters and interesting viewpoints, and a strong sense of joyful exploration on the part of the author.

2023/115: Still Life — Louise Penny

‘The funny thing about murder is that the act is often committed decades before the actual action. Something happens, and it leads, inexorably, to death many years later. A bad seed is planted. [p. 169]

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec, accompanied by his team of investigators, has been called to idyllic Three Pines to investigate the death of an elderly local artist. Jane Neal was about to reveal her art -- within her house as well as in an exhibition -- when she was found dead in the woods, killed by an arrow. The consensus in Three Pines is that it was a tragic hunting accident, but Gamache is not convinced: he initiates a murder investigation.

I liked this a great deal, though find I recall very few plot details ten days after finishing it! (I do remember narrowing down the identity of the murderer to two people, very early on: and yes, it was one of those two.) What I found so enjoyable was Penny's cast of characters: Gamache, compassionate and principled; his over-confident trainee Yvette Nichol; married artists Clara and Peter; former therapist Myrna Landers; redoubtable Ruth Zardo, head of the volunteer fire brigade and former Poet Laureate... Three Pines is not as idyllic as it first seems: there is prejudice, homophobia, decades-held grudges, meanspiritedness, greed, blackmail. But there is also a warm sense of community, of people getting along and supporting one another.

I've every intention of reading more of this long-running and well-received series, and immersing myself in Quebecois culture: I like knowing that the books are there for when I need a not-quite-cozy, vividly peopled crime novel.

2023/114: The Princess Trap — Talia Hibbert

This was probably the fastest he’d ever fucked something up. Dragging Cherry into his life felt like dragging a princess off to his lair. He was almost certainly the dragon in this fairytale. [p. 99]

Cherry Neita is thirty years old, has a decent job, is proud of the way she looks (she's Black, tall and extremely curvy) and really can't be bothered with relationships. When she meets Ruben Ambjørn -- well, when she barges into his meeting with her colleague -- she's impressed by his good looks and general demeanour. (Ruben's first thought is 'I have to have her'.) They go on a date; things get a bit heated in an alleyway; the paparazzi show up; and Cherry finds herself fake-engaged to a minor European royal with a chequered past and some major hangups.

I liked the body positivity in this, and the sex scenes were steamy and well-choreographed, but instalove is not really my trope. I also felt there were a lot of unresolved plot threads (Ruben's awful ex; what happened to his (abusive) brother and (racist) sister at the end of the story; Cherry's sister's situation). The scenes in Ruben's home country did not feel as though they were set anywhere at all: no sense of place, or time of year. And I found the pacing very uneven, especially in the later chapters. But this might all be Just Me: I think I can sum up my mood while reading this novel by revealing that my major concern for much of it was the wellbeing of Cherry's cat Whiskey. Where does he sleep? Clearly not with Cherry.

This is one of Talia Hibbert's early novels: I found it flawed, and didn't enjoy it as much as (for instance) A Girl Like Her or Get a Life, Chloe Brown, but it's still entertaining, sexy and fun, with a happy ending.

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 26 MAR 2020, prompt 'BIPOC author'.

Fulfils the ‘body positive’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

2023/113: A Place of Execution — Val McDermid

'...'The Wicker Man'? Edward Woodward plays this cop who goes off to this mysterious Scottish island to investigate a missing girl and he gets caught up in the pagan rites of the inhabitants. It’s very eerie and there are undercurrents of perverse sexual practices and strange beliefs. Well, that’s sort of what it felt like in Scardale in 1963, except we got to go home to normality at the end of the working day. And nobody tried to turn me or George into a human sacrifice...’ [p. 389]

In December 1963, a young girl goes missing from Scardale, a remote hamlet in the Peak District. Alison Carter, the stepdaughter of the local squire, was last seen walking with her dog. The dog is found tied to a tree, her muzzle taped with Elastoplast to stop her barking. There is no sign of Alison.

Detective Inspector George Bennett, new to his position and set somewhat apart from his colleagues by his university education, is determined to solve the case. Several children have lately gone missing in Manchester (newspaper accounts of these cases, the first victims of Brady and Hindley, appear in the text), but Manchester is a world away from Scardale, with its almost feudal community and the close bonds between the villagers.

Alison is not found, but there is strong (and increasingly horrific) circumstantial evidence that she has been murdered. A jury finds the accused guilty, and he is hanged.

Bennett's investigation is the subject of a book by Catherine Heathcote, who grew up near Scardale and remembers Alison Carter's disappearance. Twenty-five years later, she discovers a personal connection to the case: her friend is engaged to George Bennett's son. Heathcote's book forms the first part of A Place of Execution: it's the project that could revive her career. But after Heathcote has submitted her manuscript, Bennett gets in touch and insists that the book must not be published, because new facts have come to light.

This is a powerful and haunting novel, with vivid characterisation and a strong sense of place and time. I was particularly impressed by the inhabitants of Scardale, who almost all come from one of three families. Nearly everybody dismisses the villagers, Alison's cousins and aunts and uncles, as 'not equipped for the modern world', as inbred, as partial: there's a strong undertone of classism, and recurring jokes about Scardale's isolation. It's a strong and close-knit community, and it finds its own way to justice.

1963 is a bit before my time, but the Britain depicted in this novel is familiar to me: everyone smokes (and may ask permission if in mixed company); a clairvoyant is enlisted by a tabloid newspaper to reveal Alison's fate; children are 'protected' from the nastier aspects of life, and not deemed to have feelings. Everything was slower: but not necessarily better.

This was my first McDermid novel: I found it a compelling read, and I'm still thinking about the tragic elements, and about poor Mme Charest from Lyon, who was right.

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 14 JUL 2020, wildcard prompt.

2023/112: Broken Light — Joanne Harris

...instead of taking my invisibility as a sign that I have reached my expiry date, I can see it for what it really is. A superpower. [loc. 1563]

When Bernie Moon was a little girl -- 'when magic was easier than maths' -- she used to play House with her friend Katie. Their version of House was a kind of telepathy or empathy, a 'looking inside other people'. Katie and Bernie fell out over an incident at primary school, and Bernie lost that ability -- after a lightly-sketched but harrowing incident at secondary school -- when she had her first period. Now she's menopausal, and it's coming back...

The novel opens with a vivid dream, a woman jogging in the park at night, attacked. It's not just a dream, and Bernie's rage at the 'she shouldn't have been running alone' victim-blaming is tempered by unease at her vivid second-hand experience. Sensing predatory intentions from a man in a cafe -- who turns out to be Woody, an old friend of her husband's -- Bernie befriends barista Iris, Woody's target. She's a woman in her twenties, a comics fan who quickly recognises Bernie's gift ('Jesus, Bernie. If you’re going to have a superpower, you could at least take an interest') and encourages her to use it in positive ways. Positive for women, anyway... Woody, who now passes out every time he thinks a predatory thought, is convinced that there's a terrible feminist conspiracy to eliminate masculinity. But it's never that simple, even for somebody who can, literally, change minds.

Broken Light is told almost entirely in two voices: Bernie's LiveJournal entries, and a memoir entitled Class of '92, by Bernie's childhood friend Katie. It's evident from the start that something terrible has happened, but Harris' pacing is excellent, and keeps us guessing until (and beyond?) the end. Bernie doesn't really dwell on her own isolation, but she's married to a man who is (at best) emotionally distant; barely sees her adult son; and is endlessly frustrated by her mother. Until she joins an all-women (and very diverse) running group she doesn't really have friends.

Plenty of talking points here. Are all the men Bernie meets really that vile? Isn't she engaged in a sort of violation (a word Katie uses) when she 'looks inside' people who are unaware of her presence in their minds? Is there something especially unsettling about lurking in someone else's mind while they masturbate? Is the death of the man killed in an all-female space ('he’d seen no need to dress as a woman to do so') his own fault, or Bernie's? And why does Bernie still want to prove herself at the class reunion?

I read this voraciously, wondering (of course) what I would do with Bernie's power, what I would do in her place. Harris has said this novel was written in response to Stephen King's Carrie (in which supernatural powers arrive with Carrie's menses). I like the idea of menopause as the beginning of magic, rather than the end of visibility. Broken Light is not entirely cheerful, but I found it uplifting and positive, and full of rage, and full of hope.

This is how we change the world. Not in violence or in war, but in clarity and contemplation. Change is the thing that waits; that hopes; that sometimes skirts the shadows; that hides under the bedclothes; that tidies up the leftovers; that whispers to your children; that looks at you from polished doors and in reflective surfaces; that sometimes bleeds; and yet is strong, maybe stronger than anyone. [loc. 5180]

2023/111: A Power Unbound — Freya Marske

... neither of them were given to trust. Both of them had been twisted up by the plain facts of their existence. The past could turn you into a strip of paper with a single side, so that comfort and vulnerability slid away down invisible channels and couldn't be grasped. [loc. 4436]

Concluding the trilogy begun in A Marvellous Light and continued in A Restless Truth, A Power Unbound focuses on Lord Hawthorn (he of the dead sister and dark past, more familiarly known as Jack Alston) and Alan Ross (journalist, pornographer and revolutionary), and their role in the increasingly urgent hunt for the final component of the Last Contract -- the tripartite physical representation (coin, cup and knife) of a contract with the fae, which makes magic possible. Jack and Alan, together with the Blyth siblings Robin and Maud, Maud's lover the dashing Violet Debenham, Robin's lover Edwin Courcey, and various free-thinking representatives of the magical establishment, are opposed by Jack's cousin George -- who turns out to be responsible for many of Jack's current woes -- and his cohorts. George, and many others, believe that dark times are coming* and that power should be concentrated in the hands of those best qualified to wield it: themselves. Jack's political and social tendencies are more Liberal, while Alan hates anyone with unearned power who uses it against others.

Power and privilege are very much in the forefront of this novel: the vulnerability of those who don't have privilege, and thus no protection against injustice; the difference between real-world power imbalances and how those imbalances play out in sexual fantasies (Alan is a pornographer); the ways in which privilege can be abused, or used to improve the lives of those without influence; ways of acquiring privilege, licit or otherwise. These issues are woven through a complex plot full of reversals, unexpected romantic and emotional developments, and explorations of the nature and origin of British -- or is it specifically English? -- magic. There are several excellent female characters (I'm particularly fond of the Countess of Cheetham, Jack's mother, and Adelaide Morrissey, as well as the Grimm), some vivid depictions of London life in the Edwardian era, and a truly unsettling wardrobe. Marske provides a tense, surprising and (eventually) very satisfactory conclusion to the trilogy: I enjoyed it immensely, and now want to reread all three novels! And I'm eager to see what she does next...

NB: beware of Amazon's subtitling: "A Power Unbound: a spicy, magical historical romp (The Last Binding Book 3)". Dear Amazon (and others), please never use the word 'romp' for anything except light-hearted erotica, which this is not: yes, there is quite a lot of explicit M/M sex, but there is also a great deal of serious plot, peril and unpleasantness.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 09 NOV 2023.

*The novel is set in 1909...

2023/110: The Dechronization of Sam McGruder — George Gaylord Simpson

Its teeth were six-inch daggers and gleamed white as it swung its ponderous head to face me. In a sort of hypnotic horror I thought inconsequentially, 'But your teeth should be dark brown!'. I had often seen the tyrannosaur skull in the Museum, and its teeth were deeply coloured. I had never stopped to think ... that in the living animal the teeth would be white. [p. 51]

Published posthumously, this novella is the work of renowned paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson: it comes with a preface by Arthur C Clarke and an afterword by Stephen Jay Gould (who strongly suggests that Simpson wrote this story as a riposte to those whose theories did not chime with his own).

The tale opens in the mid-22nd century, with a group of (male) scholars -- the Universal Historian, the Pragmatist, the Ethnologist, the Common Man, et cetera -- discussing whether it is ever possible to know that one is, and always will be, wholly alone. Why, yes! says the Historian, and provides the text of a testament found chiselled onto rock slabs. The author is Sam McGruder: while performing an experiment on the quantum theory of time, he accidentally sends himself 80 million years into the past with no hope of return. He laboriously records his encounters with various dinosaurs (vivid, but now outdated) and his survival strategies. He is, of course, incredibly lonely (I note that he does not attempt to tame any of the beasts he meets: surely a small herbivore would be better than no company at all?) and frequently wonders whether it would be better to just give up. But he doesn't.

An odd little novella, probably never intended for publication: thought-provoking, nicely described (I found it easy to overlook the aspects that are now outdated) and with intriguing glimpses of the future that McGruder lost.

I have a feeling that I read this -- or at least owned it -- back in the 90s: I borrowed a scanned version from the Internet Archive.

2023/109: The Luminaries — Eleanor Catton

'My father always told me, when it comes to whores and fortune tellers, never give your real name... I like the telling fortunes part. It was rather a thrill, to use another man’s name. It made me feel invisible, somehow. Or doubled—as though I had split myself in two.’ [p. 703]

The setting is Hokitika, a gold-rush town on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island, in the 1860s. The novel begins when Walter Moody, recovering from a traumatic and possibly supernatural experience on board the Godspeed, walks into a room at the hotel where he's staying, and discovers a group of twelve men (including a Maori and two Chinese) who eventually begin to tell their stories. They're all there to try to make sense of the death of a recluse, the disappearance of a rich young prospector, and the savage beating of an opium-addicted prostitute. The Luminaries also features forged documents, a threatening chap with a scarred face, a glamorous medium, a surfeit of opium, plus illegitimate children, long-held grudges, secret marriages, and a plethora of more or less likely explanations of the death of Crosbie Wells, the whereabouts of Emery Staines, and the mystery of Anna Wetherell's pistol.

Eleanor Catton's vast Booker-winning homage to the Victorian novel is rigorously structured around an astrological framework: twelve key characters correspond to the twelve houses of the zodiac, and another seven correspond to 'heavenly bodies', while one man, dead by the time the novel opens, stands as 'terra firma', the centre around which everything revolves. Each of the twelve sections is prefixed by an astrological chart showing the positions of the planets in the southern hemisphere in 1866; each chapter within those twelve sections is titled with an astrological description ('Mercury in Sagittarius', for example, which deals with the interaction of the characters corresponding to Mercury and to Sagittarius) and introduced by a brief summary of events within that chapter. As the novel progresses, the chapters get shorter and the summaries get longer. The title, too, is astrological in origin: the eponymous luminaries, astrologically, are the sun and the moon, and the novel deals with (though perhaps does not focus on) the characters to whom the author has ascribed those roles. Catton has said (though I can't now find the source) that she refused to make editorial revisions that did not make sense astrologically.

It's not an easy novel to review, simply because there is so much in it. I suspect I'll come back to it in a few years and find much that I missed this time. But it was a fascinating read, not only for Catton's twisty plotting and the multiplicity of truths, but also for the atmosphere of what's effectively a frontier town, and the odd blend of Victorian morality and new beginnings 'at the southernmost edge of the civilised world'. Catton doesn't obscure or apologise for racism and sexism, and she treats the non-white and non-male characters with the same respect and honesty as she does the white men. And I am very nearly certain that the explanation given near the end of the book for the death, the beating and the disappearance (to say nothing of the missing bullet, the opium poisoning and perhaps the seance) is a convenient invention by one character, rather than any kind of objective truth.

This novel also strongly reminded me of previous visits to New Zealand, particularly to Canvastown (another goldrush settlement): I would love to go back.

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 05 JAN 2014, prompt 'so long'. 832 pages in print!

Fulfils the ‘featuring one of the seven deadly sins’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge: avarice drives much of this novel.