2024/016: The Final Girl Support Group — Grady Hendrix

Teenagers talk like this, right? Even if it’s ugly in retrospect. I didn’t know there was a bloody engine inside his head just waiting for someone to turn it on. [loc. 2505]

Lynnette is the sole survivor of an infamous massacre. She's in group therapy with a number of other 'final girls', each of whom has survived contact with (and most of whom have then killed) a monster. Hendrix bases Lynnette and her fellow survivors on 'final girls' in various Eighties horror movies, but in the world he portrays, the 'final girls' own the rights to their stories, which have become successfu franchises. Each of the women in the group has handled the aftermath of horror differently. Julia, left partially paralysed by her experience, is an activist; Adrienne advocates for other survivors; Heather has turned to drink and drugs; Lynnette ... well, the therapist who leads the group, Doctor Carol, describes her as 'hypervigilant'. All Lynnette does is go to therapy and then (using a different route every time and memorising the footwear -- hardest thing to change -- of everyone she meets) home again. She does have a friend. He is a pepper plant named Fine, short for Final Plant.

The novel, after a session of bickering at group therapy, kicks off with one of the Final Girls being murdered. There are rumours that someone in the group is writing a book about her fellow patients, revealing everyone's secrets. Lynnette quickly discovers that her safe fortress of an apartment isn't safe. It seems that someone is out to get them all. Who can she trust? And is she being paranoid, or is she the only person who understands the danger?

Lots here about PTSD, about the dark side of therapy, and especially about gender-based violence. 'Men don’t have to pay attention the way we do. Men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we’re female.' [loc. 359] The characters sometimes feel stereotyped (the jock, the nerd, the cheerleader etc), but I think that's partly because each of them was trapped by, and still focusses on, what happened to her, unable to move past it. Happily (at least for me), the descriptions of the things that did happen to the Final Girls are generally sparse and matter-of-fact, being recounted by the women themselves. On the other hand, there's quite a lot of violence during the events of the novel. And at least one point where Lynnette is very badly injured but still, somehow, manages to run up a hill?

Note to publishers, and indeed authors: if your book includes images that contain text, please provide the ebook equivalent of alt text. The text on the images following each chapter -- therapist notes, police reports, forum discussions -- was not readable on my Kindle, and I had to switch to my phone to read, which is not always an option.

Fulfils the ‘a cover without people on it’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

2024/015: Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise — Katherine Rundell

...children’s fiction necessitates distillation: at its best, it renders in their purest, most archetypal forms hope, hunger, joy, fear. Think of children’s books as literary vodka. [loc. 127]

Rundell's essay on the experience of reading children's books as an adult, and rediscovering the hope, the subversion, the miracles that overcome chaos. Rundell is immensely eloquent, and uses her own experience as a popular writer for children to describe the crafting of stories that contain 'the things that I most urgently and desperately want children to know and adults to remember'. She writes about how the best children's books describe the world as a huge and mysterious place, full of things yet to be learnt or encountered or overcome: and she reminds us that children, politically and economically powerless, have a different perspective on the world. The big emotions in children's books -- the victories over darkness, the importance of bravery and loyalty and love -- are a counterbalance to the great unknowns: they're layered with the darker knowledge of the adult writing, and often with a weight of myth and legend that won't necessarily be known (or even perceived) by a child reading, but will add depth to their experience of the book.

I do read quite a few children's books, even though I am so old. (Still, forever, working on wisdom.) And I love the sense of recognition when I'm rereading an old favourite, and the envy I feel for children reading today with so many more marvellous, diverse, questioning and fantastical books to read.

Fulfils the ‘about books’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

Fulfils the ‘Non-fiction recommended by a friend ’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 reading challenge. Thanks, Claire!

2024/014: Him — Geoff Ryman

"...there is a world in which God does not kill me.”
“What’s different in that world?” Maryam wanted to make this world like that one.
“I can only glimpse it and it’s like a fan opening over and over with the same faces only slightly different. Sometimes different stars. Sometimes… sometimes I was born a man.” [loc. 4552]

What if Jesus was born female?

This is the story of Maryam, who was told by 'fire in the shape of something like a person' that she would give birth to a child made only of herself, and that this child would be special to God. Maryam is a clever woman: she arranges to marry Yosef, who is being exiled for his outspoken views on theology. They make a life in Nazareth, a stony and desolate place where Maryam gives birth to a girl she names Avigayil. She's identical to Maryam, precocious, and loves to listen to Yosef reading scripture. And, when she is five and a village boy dies of a fever, she declares that her name is now Yehushua -- her dead friend's name. "That's a boy's name," says Maryam. "I'm a boy," insists the child.

Maryam does not deal well with a daughter who claims to be a son. Yosef is sory that the child, being a girl, cannot preach: but he sees that 'The body says girl but the spirit says different'. And Yehushua -- later Yehush -- lives as a boy, argues with priests, works with his hands, and occasionally says things that Maryam finds profoundly unnerving. For years she refers to him as the Cub, or 'it': a large part of the novel deals with Maryam coming to terms with the nature of this child she bore, who is also the embodiment of God.

The God here is thoroughly alien, trying to learn about life and death and pain through Yehush; trying to understand the world; needing to know 'what it was like to be created by someone else'. Yehush's miracle-working is uncomfortable and unnerving, and his humanity is leavened with something quite other -- something that can see aspects of the future, something that doesn't always understand the way that humans move through time. ("We can’t see the future, you know. For us to see things, they have to happen first.") While many of the events of the novel are familiar from the Bible, the non-anglicisation of names and the perspective of Maryam (and, briefly, Yehush's envious sister Babatha, who strongly rejects Yehush's male identity) makes those tales new and strange. I was captivated: by Maryam, by miracles, by God, by Yehush's foreknowledge of his fate. I loved the historical and social detail -- this feels a well-researched book, though the research is in a hundred little details rather than an authorial lecture -- and the harshness of the desert, and the sheer strangeness of Yehush's life and death.

Fulfils the ‘Historical fiction set in West Asia’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/013: Strong Female Character — Fern Brady

My mum and teen brother came through to Edinburgh and took me out for Japanese food as there was no other way in our culture of saying, ‘Sorry you’ve gone mad again.’ [loc. 2601]

Comedian Fern Brady's account of growing up in a working-class environment with undiagnosed autism: being treated as 'bad' or 'difficult' as a child, a spell in the local psychiatric unit, feeling -- and being -- excluded at school and university... Brady (whose comedy work I wasn't familiar with) is scathingly and refreshingly honest. She illustrates facts and misconceptions about autism with anecdata from her own experience, and leavens the grimness with humour. I'm (probably) not autistic but can relate to quite a few of her experiences. It did strike me that the combination of Brady's autism and her working-class background was a toxic synergy: her struggle to function at university, and her ongoing difficulties with social subtext and white lies, felt like class issues as much as autism issues. ("Why did everyone go around speaking in code then getting angry at me because I didn’t have the glossary for their secret language?" [loc. 876])

This book has given me more insight into the ways in which autistic people can struggle to make sense of allistic society. At some points it made me weepy: I definitely laughed out loud more than once. Frank and feminist and funny and angry.

Fulfils the ‘honest’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge. "Our autistic honesty is described as blunt or brutal or too much..."

2024/012: Saint Death's Daughter — C S E Cooney

He said that your violent reaction to violence was the core of your necromancy—that one day your body would revolt so magnificently against death that you would raise the very dead themselves... [loc. 308]

Miscellaneous Stones -- known as Lanie -- is in her teens when both her parents (Natty, the Chief Executioner, and Aba, the Royal Assassin) die. Her skills as necromancer are not yet mature enough to bring them back for more than a few moments, and when an unexpected creditor shows up demanding the family house and all its contents -- including the undead housekeeper Goody Graves, and the Sarcophagus of Souls which is locked by a padlock containing the ghost of Lanie's Grandpa Rad -- Lanie is forced to write to her elder sister Nita (short for Amanita) and ask her to come back from school.

Nita is gorgeous, fearsome and cruel, and Lanie (who's literally allergic to violence, and will suffer sympathetic pain if exposed to other people's physical damage) is, with good reason, afraid of her. And now Nita's brought back a lover: a falcon shapechanger, Mak, who she effectively stole from his bonded handler.

This is a long novel. A great deal happens in it, and a vast and complex world is revealed. There is necromancy (I loved Lanie's adoring group of reanimated mouse skeletons); concealed identity; footnotes; polyamory, genderqueerness, romance, found family and cross-dressing; a society where women are often in positions of relative power; a pantheon of twelve gods who all seem to be female, though not necessarily humanoid; a language which is rendered on-page as iambic pentameter; magical tides and solstitial celebrations; and some graphic violence, which viewpoint character Lanie mercifully shies from. I enjoyed it massively, as befits a book with so much to it. The dark humour and the emotional rollercoaster delighted me, and the author's joy in language made me joyful too.

[Saint Death's] cloak’s infinite but invisible train spilled down the sides of the tower in a cascade of interlocking bone and shell and chiton, in a hundred million fossilized leaves from trees that the planet Athe knew only in its youngest days, in chains of long-extinct insects trapped in amber, in festoons of fangs that once had studded the jaws of leviathans, in a lacework of the claws of dragons—or things out of which dragons were dreamed; in the beads of embryos that had died when they were yet too tiny to be detected by the naked eye. [loc. 8495]

Cooney's prose is alight with unexpected metaphors and obscure words (labefaction, hamartia, guisarmes) and the rhythms of her sentences are hypnotic: I'd love to hear her read aloud.

This is, apparently, the first in a trilogy: a fact I only discovered after finishing the novel, so I can confirm that it's a complete story in itself, without a cliffhanger ending or a sense of something lacking. I am very much looking forward to rereading Saint Death's Daughter in advance of the second volume.

My first challenge to myself, for the first draft, was to try to write a fantasy novel where the protagonist could not, absolutely could not, solve problems by a.) punching people in the face, b.) skewering people with a sword, c.) shooting them, burning them, pwning them, or otherwise eviscerating them. If I took away all violent choices--OUT OF A FANTASY NOVEL!!!--what's left? [source: Cooney's AMA on Reddit]

Fulfils the ‘more than 40 chapters’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

2024/011: Burntcoat — Sarah Hall

Is it possible to work with a material so long and still not understand its condition? We are figures briefly draw in space; given temporary form in exchange for consciousness, sense, a chance. We are ready-mades, disposables. How do we live every last moment as this -- savant dust? [p. 166]

My desire to read this short novel was sparked by my discovery that it was, in part, about the narrator Edith's relationship with her mother, who suffered a brain haemorrhage when Edith was eight years old, and effectively became a different person whom Edith knew as Naomi. (I was ten when I experienced something very similar, though I did not bestow a new name on my mother.) Edith becomes an sculptor of some renown, and the eponymous Burntcoat is her home, a converted warehouse that's spacious enough to accommodate her works.

But this is a pandemic novel, though not quite our pandemic. Burntcoat features a hantavirus called Nova, which she caught from her Turkish lover -- who in turn caught it when set upon by looters while trying to retrieve food from his closed restaurant. The frame of the novel is Edith looking back from the vantage point of her late fifties, aware that the long-dormant virus is reactivating in her body, and that she will soon die.

Burntcoat felt like a set of unfinished stories: Edith's relationship with her mother (who dies while Edith is studying art in Japan); Edith's father, who leaves the wife who's no long the woman he loved and remarries; the pandemic itself, its social effects recognisable, if magnified, from our own experience; the ways the world has changed. In the end I think it's a story about bodies. There's a lot of graphic sex between Edith and her lover, and the whole novel is replete with human physicality, from pissing as a sign of dominance, to the scars of Edith's mother's surgery, to the gradual putrescence of a corpse.

I wasn't exactly disappointed -- Hall's writing is never a disappointment -- but this was not the book I'd hoped it would be.

Fulfils the ‘one word title’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/010: The Game of Courts — Victoria Goddard

That the Emperor was their sun was metaphorical, a statement of political fiction or theology: that he would burn or blind those who got too close simple fact. [loc. 299]

Another Goddard novella, focussing on Cavalier Conju enazo Argellian an Vilius and his life before he became the Emperor's Groom of the Chamber. The story begins with Conju having survived the catastrophic Fall of Astandalas, and spending the year, or century, afterwards -- the period during which the Emperor was in a magical sleep -- drinking his way through the supplies in the palace, and hanging out with a bunch of disreputable and debauched fellow survivors. (All his actual friends are dead.) Then the Emperor wakes, and Conju sobers up and discovers an ambition: to become one of the inner circle who tend to His Radiancy, a man notoriously particular -- like Conju himself -- about his attire and appearance. And does not care for mindless obedience, or for the prison of etiquette.

Woven through that story is Conju's grief for his lost love Terec; his occasional dalliances; his skills as a perfumier and arbiter of fashion, and and his growing friendship with a quiet fellow at court, who is only later revealed to be the Emperor's new secretary. And it becomes obvious that Conju has quietly manipulated circumstances -- a rumour here, a choice there, a morsel of gossip -- to the benefit of his lord.

This was a delight to read: I love the way that Goddard brings secondary characters to life, and her depiction of the beginnings of friendship between Conju and Kip (and the beginnings of something more rareified between Conju and His Radiancy) is understated. Especially good to see Conju discovering that in fact he does have a sense of humour.

After reading this I dipped into The Hands of the Emperor to see how Conju had matured. But one does not just 'dip into'...

2024/009: Clary Sage — Victoria Goddard

Hal didn’t know how to say that he wanted to see what he was, who he was, when he wasn’t the duke. [loc. 607]

A short novella set some time before the 'Greenwing and Dart' series (see here for the first in that series). This is the story of Hal, whose mother and sister have noticed that he hasn't laughed once since he returned from school. This is because Hal is the Imperial Duke of Fillering Pool, and he wants to be more than that: but he's about to go to university, and the dukes have always gone to Tara to follow the triplum of economics, political philosophy and law, and he doesn't want to. He's more interested in botany than in Tara's course of study, never mind that it has been followed by 'many of your grace's distinguished forebears'. And he wants to escape, just for a little while, the burden of those forebears and the family name.

Clary Sage is the story of how Hal breaks free of tradition and chooses Morrowlea, a small institution with a reputation for radicalism and an insistence that the students are known by first names only: no rank here. It's also a study of a young man at a vulnerable time in his life, always watching those around him, constantly turning over other people's opinions and trying to find his own. There's some fascinating backstory, too, about the Fall of Astandalas and the death of Hal's father (and how he feels about that).

I do like how Goddard brings her secondary characters to life in her novellas. And of course each one I read lures me back in to her Nine Worlds. Is it time to reread The Hands of the Emperor yet?

2024/008: The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are — Michael Pye

This is not the usual story of muddled battles and various kings and the spread of Christianity. It is the story of how the constant exchanges over water, the half-knowledge that things could be done differently, began to change people’s minds profoundly. This cold, grey sea in an obscure time made the modern world possible. [loc. 165]

This excellent book has an alternate subtitle in some editions: "A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe". This may be more accurate, and more inclusive (who's the 'us' who've been made who we are?) but less poetic.

Pye's thesis, illustrated by examples from archaeology and geology as well as textual sources, is that the countries around the North Sea developed an international trading network in the early medieval period, re-introducing coins as an alternative to barter. He points out that from a port on the east coast of England, in medieval times, it was quicker to sail to Norway than to travel overland to York or London. Trade wasn't restricted to North Sea coasts, either: there is evidence of 'fishwives eating pomegranates and figs, one of them had gold velvet from Genoa, they used the fierce red melagueta peppers in their cooking and they had dishes, plates and cups of Spanish majolica' [loc. 3325]

There's a lot about seafarers (especially the Vikings) and religious communities, including the beguines (women leading a religious life without the usual restrictions of nunneries). Indeed, Pye is as interesting on the subject of womens' lives as on everything else. He suggests that priorities were different in societies where the men were away on voyages for extended periods: the women took care of business at home, and family ties became more flexible. "... in Italian towns, men wanted to be buried with their ancestors, with as much of a male line as they could find and if necessary some invented coats of arms. Around the North Sea, it was the marriage and the children that mattered." [loc. 4473].

The aspect of the book that interested me most, though, was the sense of temporary landscape, from the drowned houses which could be glimpsed at the lowest tides to the network of dikes, drains and ditches that kept the land more or less dry. I was hooked by Pye's opening narrative about Domburg, where in 1650 a storm revealed wooden coffins, the skulls all facing west, the dead buried with grave goods in a most unChristian way. 'For a few days the past was as solid as a coffin, unexplained like a ghost; and then the waters swept back and hid the dead before anyone could find out who they were.' [loc. 130] I learnt more about the ceaseless shifting of the balance between land and sea; the terpens, or mounds, built by the Frisians in the marshes, and the constant work of holding back the tide. I hadn't recognised that after the Black Death, there weren't enough able-bodied people to maintain pastureland (the ground being too salty for crops) or to keep the sea defenses intact. 'Sand, silt and sinking land were problems all around the North Sea. From now on, there could be no more unconsidered landscape...' [loc. 3015]

This is a fascinating book full of rabbitholes: the Heliand, an Old Saxon poem which retells part of the Bible in a distinctly Northern idiom; the initiation rites of the Hanseatic League; the Italian sumptuary laws aimed at women because 'their clothes cost so much that men couldn’t marry, which was leading to sodomy, so fashion was distracting everyone from the serious business of replenishing the population'; the absence of rats in the archaeological record around the North Sea, until 'the early Middle Ages'... I found the later chapters, focussed on trade and politics, less enthralling than the medieval parts, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Fulfils the ‘calendar’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge. '[Bede] had to find names for years that were still in the future, something which neither Germans nor Romans did ... We still date events from the ‘year of Our Lord’, Annus Domini, the year of Christ’s birth; that was Bede’s invention – part of his solution to the problem of the calendar.'

2024/007: Give the Devil his Due — Steve Hockensmith and Lisa Falco

One thing I had learned for sure about tarot readings: Doing them while driving wasn’t a great idea. [p. 131]

Warning: this entire review is basically a spoiler for Fool Me Once.

Alanis is dealing with the unexpected arrival of a man she'd thought dead: Biddle, who was the closest she had to a father, and who she last saw being led off by some people who wanted him dead. Now he's here in Arizona -- but does he have an ulterior motive? Could his reappearance be connected with a middle-aged man, found murdered at a local hotel shortly after getting a tarot reading from Alanis? What about the German tycoon who's taking an interest in the town? And the stolen Van Gogh that Alanis may unwittingly hold the key to recovering? And the delightful Fixer, gun for hire? (Not to mention the two ageing thugs who muscle in on Alanis' investigation: 'They weren’t old. Not so long as somebody feared them.')

This was a quick and entertaining read - I was kept guessing by the plot, and am sad to discover that there are no further novels in the series (yet). Will Alanis decide which of her suitors (boring Victor, petty criminal G.W.) is worthy? Will Clarice live up to her potential? Will the White Magic Five and Dime ever break even?

One niggle: persons in the middle of an investigation who don't answer the phone / check their voicemail. (This also came up in The Widows of Malabar.) Obviously they're not expecting any urgent plot points updates about their case...

2024/006: Fool Me Once — Steve Hockensmith and Lisa Falco

“I am a fraud,” I said. “And my mother was a con artist. But that doesn’t mean I won’t help you.” [p. 41]

I'd enjoyed The White Magic Five and Dime, so when I unexpectedly scored another three months' free Kindle Unlimited I decided to read the rest of the series. Fool Me Once begins with an angry husband dragging his wife, Marsha, out of one of her regular tarot readings. Our narrator Alanis (the person reading the cards, and beginning to wonder if she's actually faking it at all) takes exception to this -- which makes her a person of interest when Marsha's husband is killed. Alanis and Marsha, together with Alanis' half-sister Clarice and Clarice's girlfriend Ceecee, need to identify the real murderer before (a) anyone else is kiled (b) Alanis goes to prison.

It's a fairly standard mystery setup, but much enlivened by the tarot readings (provided by Lisa Falco: the spreads are all illustrated and Alanis' commentary is full of insight) and by Alanis herself, who's a likeable character despite a criminal past. She's trying to make amends for her dead mother's cheating and manipulation, and re-examining her own past, especially her relationship with the father-figure she knew as Biddle. And she's trying to find a professional killer, who turns out (in a delightful critique of ageism) to be a 'little old lady'. With an Uzi in her shopping bag. Kudos!

Warning: this novel ends with a massive cliffhanger: I immediately started reading the next book ...

2024/005: Cahokia Jazz — Francis Spufford

'If you don’t pay attention to what things mean, you miss a piece of the puzzle. Without the meaning of things, without the stories people tell about them – that people believe about them – you can’t understand events, Detective. You can’t understand this city.’ [loc. 475]

Joe Barrow is an orphan who's drifted south from the icy winds of Chicago to Cahokia, that cosmopolitan city on the banks of the Mississippi 'where red and white and black have lived together in trust and confidence for fifty years'. It's 1922: the Ku Klux Klan is popular amongst the minority takata (folk of European origin); the taklousa (of African origin) have flocked south in the Mississippi Renaissance, to a city without Jim Crow laws; and the takouma (Native American), the majority of the city's population, have ensured that land, water and power are communally owned. Barrow, of mixed takouta and taklousa blood -- but without any comprehension of Anopa, the takouma lingua franca -- is working as a policeman, but that's just a job. He'd like to be playing piano with one or another of the jazz bands that swings through the city. The events of the week chronicled in Cahokia Jazz will force him to decide which life he truly wants.

The novel opens with a gruesome murder atop the Land Trust building. An inoffensive clerk has been murdered, and his heart torn out. It looks -- as the tabloid press are quick to point out -- exactly like an Aztec sacrifice. But the takouma aren't Aztecs (cue a delightful cameo from cultural anthropologist Professor Alfred Kroeber, who will later -- we hope -- become the father of Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, to whose memory the book is dedicated) and the crime scene may be an elaborate setup designed to discredit the takouma. For the city, unique in the United States, is led by the Man of the Sun, takouma royalty who might as well be a king: Barrow finds himself drawn into the myths and symbols of the takouma -- and to the Man of the Sun's niece, the Woman of the Moon. As his investigations into the Land Trust murder take Barrow and his partner Drummond into the dives, factories, churches and palaces of Cahokia, and reveal unsettling alliances and enduring symbols, some difficult truths are revealed.

This is basically a noir detective novel in the mode of Chandler or Hammett, with added Jesuits and Native Americans: also Jazz Age poets, bootleggers, dreams of California and an altered North America where history has played out rather differently, for reasons Spufford only really explains in his afterword. Barrow's ignorance of the city allows a great deal of information to be imparted without too many infodumps. His growing sense that he might have found a place to belong is balanced by some uncomfortable realisations about the unique character of Cahokia. (‘That’s what you get for living where the mythic order of things is alive and well. You want less magic, you should move to Indianapolis,’ Professor Kroeber tells him.)

Cahokia Jazz dragged me in: I laughed, I wept, I voluntarily listened to jazz. The Man of the Sun is especially fascinating; so's Oscar, his bodyguard; so, gradually, is Barrow. But Cahokia itself, and the altered America which skews around it (fewer, and different, states; a different Civil War; significant differences in Griffiths' Birth of a Nation) is the main attraction. I'm already looking forward to rereading ... perhaps around the spring equinox.

The Man was standing on the topmost point of the Mound, Couma beside him. The grass was turning green around his shoes. Through an arch of flowers, an arch of bread, an arch of bones, comes the spring.

Fulfils the ‘Time frame spans a week or less’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

2024/004: The Widows of Malabar Hill — Sujata Massey

“A woman has a lifetime for reading. A whole week every month!” Mrs. Sodawalla said. Perveen didn’t quite know what she meant by that... [p. 132]

Perveen Mistry, daughter of a prominent Parsi lawyer, is the only woman solicitor in Bombay. It's a heavy responsibility, and she is fettered by patriarchal conventions and pervasive misogyny. India in 1921, with its multiple ethnic and religious groups -- Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and others -- comprises a bewildering array of laws, customs and loyalties. There are initiatives to educate women (though Perveen had a miserable time at a Bombay law school, eventually studying in England) and more women entering the professions: but even a well-educated woman of good family cannot avoid sexist behaviour and ancient, oppressive traditions.

When a woman's signature appears to have been faked, Perveen is ideally placed to intercede: the woman in question is one of the three widows of Omar Farid, and they are purdahnashins, women who stay 'behind the veil' and don't speak with men. A lady solicitor? No problem -- at least for the widows. Their estate trustee, Mr Mukri, seems to have his own ideas about the dead man's wealth and the widows' assets: he is hostile to Perveen. And she is the one to find him dead ...

I enjoyed this very much, though the backstory of Perveen's relationship with a dashing young Parsi fellow, Cyrus, is a brutal depiction of tradition at its worst. Perveen is a sensible, courageous and somewhat headstrong young woman, who's determined to see justice done and sympathetic to the widows (and their children) who have little power now that Mr Farid is dead. We also meet her friend from Oxford, Alice, who's the daughter of a high-ranking British functionary, and who is queer. I'm hoping she turns up in the other novels in this series.

Fulfils the ‘buddy read’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge: I read in sync with N.

2024/003: Our Share of Night — Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell

'There are parts of a lot of people here.' It wasn’t Adela who had said that, though someone had used her voice. Who was speaking through her? [p. 297]

This is a long and extraordinarily dense novel, sometimes rambling, sometimes horribly precise and specific: but at the heart is the relationship between Juan and his son Gaspar. Juan is a medium, the only person who can manifest the entity known as the Darkness. This appears as a 'black light' which can sever human flesh instantly and cleanly -- though not painlessly. It is worshipped and kept secret by the Order, an international occult conspiracy. The Order's wealthy leaders dwell in a remote corner of Argentina, complicit with the dictatorship which keeps them supplied with sacrificial victims. Juan's wife Rosario was killed by the Order: Juan expected to be able to speak to her ghost, but cannot. (I learnt that there's no word in Spanish for haunting, so he has to say it in English: 'not embrujar, not aparecer, it was haunt'.) The Order and Juan both believe that Gaspar has inherited Juan's gift: the Order want to ensure that they control the boy, and Juan will do anything to keep him safe and out of the Order's hands. Because the Order's plans for Gaspar (and for Juan) are too frightful to be countenanced.

Enríquez' horror often focusses on disassembled, dehumanised body parts (a severed arm, a row of torsos, a box full of eyelids) and I think that 'The Zañartú Pit' (a chapter focussing on an investigative journalist recording stories about the disappeared and about the excavation of a mass grave) helped me to think about that choice: about the appalling volume of human remains left by the dictatorship, about bodies left to rot into pieces rather than being given death rites, about the anonymity of bones and limbs and organs. In Our Share of Night, human life is very cheap -- and it is a commodity, a requirement for the rituals with the Darkness and for the oppression by the dictatorship.

I was reminded of Elizabeth Knox's Black Oxen, though that is set in an imaginary, and more Central than South American, country: the elements of the fantastic in that novel feel somehow safer because not rooted in reality and in the author's own experience.

Fulfils the ‘at least four different POV’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge. (Juan, Gaspar, Dr Bradford, Tali, Pablo ...)

Fulfils the ‘multiple timelines’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/002: The House in the Cerulean Sea — T J Klune

“He’s here to make sure I don’t burn anyone alive with the power of my mind and then consume their souls from their smoking carcass.”
“Rock on, little dude,” J-Bone said, offering a high five which Lucy gladly accepted. “I mean, I hope that doesn’t happen to me, but you do you.” [p. 263]

Linus Baker is forty years old. He lives in a city where it always rains. He has a house, an unfriendly cat, an intrusive neighbour and a substantial record collection, and he works for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. One day, amid the usual workplace miseries and conflicts, he's called upstairs by Extremely Upper Management and tasked to investigate a remote orphanage run by a mysterious chap named Arthur Parnassus. Linus (and his unimpressed cat) make the long journey, only to be met by someone who's probably a supernatural being, and to encounter several more magical beings. For the children in Arthur's care are all magical, and some of them are very odd indeed; a wyvern, a shapechanging Pomeranian, a bearded female gnome, an amorphous blob, another sprite, and Lucy (short for Lucifer) who is the literal Antichrist. Though there's little or no mention of the non-anti Christ or of organised religion, or indeed of magical adults.

Linus is initially nervous and prejudiced, but soon comes to realise that the children are people -- not just Magical, but Youth, to be protected and cared for and given a home -- and that Arthur is an excellent protector for them. Linus also finds himself thinking of Arthur as a friend... or something more. Perhaps the Department in Charge of Magical Youth is not as infallible as he'd always assumed. Perhaps he can change things.

This is a sweet and sentimental novel, focussing on Linus' transformation rather than on the underlying inequalities. Lucy may not be fulfilling his appalling destiny but he's surely still a world-class threat, especially if his daddy comes visiting. Arthur, too, is capable of fearsome behaviour. But Linus is convinced -- on the basis of some sympathetic souls in the nearby village -- that he can make the world a better place: a laudable intention, and one that is rewarded by a sense of belonging and an opportunity for romantic love. The House in the Cerulean Sea is simplistic and rose-tinted, but it's a pleasant evening's read when the world is shaded grey and it always rains in the city.

Since I read this novel I've discovered that the author consciously based the scenario on the Sixties Scoop>, a welfare scheme in mid-20th century Canada that 'removed Indigenous children from their families and communities and placed them in non-Indigenous foster homes or adoptive families, institutions, and residential schools'. I was not aware of the Sixties Scoop, and I'm not comfortable about how Klune has used it.

Fulfils the ‘features the ocean’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

2024/001: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.” [loc. 5678]

Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet, as preteens, at a hospital. Sadie's visiting her sister Alice, who has cancer: Sam hasn't spoken to anyone since the car accident that mangled his foot and killed his mother. All he does is play video games -- but Sadie's a gamer too, and they become best friends. They're apart for a few years because of a misunderstanding, then reconnect as students in Boston, where their creative partnership spawns a best-selling game, Ichigo. They start a gaming company, Unfair Games, with Sadie's wealthy friend Marx. But Sadie and Sam are motivated by different impulses (she's female, white, Jewish and fairly wealthy; he's part-Korean and has always been poor) and driven apart by another stupid misunderstanding lack of communication, as well as that typical late-Nineties sexism in gaming culture. The dynamics of the three protagonists change and change again under the pressures of the real world: and then tragedy strikes.

I related to both Sam and Sadie, though less so to Marx, who I don't think is as developed a character. I too was a woman in tech (though not in the gaming industry) in the Nineties, and sexism was everywhere. Sam has very little privilege compared to Sadie, but he does have the trump card: he's male.

I especially liked the way Zevin depicted the synergy of co-creation -- as Sadie reflects somewhere in the middle of the novel, "There were so many people who could be your lover, but... relatively few people who could move you creatively." Zevin's a playful author, too: she switches viewpoint characters and voices, sets scenes within games, turns random coincidences into plot points, riffs off gaming terminology such as NPC (non-player character), and weaves real-world events into the story. It was Zevin's prose and inventiveness that kept me reading when I got annoyed at Sam and / or Sadie for their appalling miscommunications. In that respect (though not really any other) their relationship reminded me of the kind of romantic novel that's fraught with unspoken explanations, misunderstandings, and faulty assumptions.

There are a lot of unpleasant moments here: car accidents, suicide, homophobia, gun violence, poverty, medical trauma, unethical relationships. But there is also the joy of creation, and the ways in which gaming reflects life, and the surprises (and coincidences) that the real world springs, unscripted, on the novel's protagonists.

Fulfils the ‘Women In STEM’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.