2024/061: Salt and Broom — Sharon Lynn Fisher

"...what you are telling me is that Lowood— that Mr. Brocklehurst —does not sanction the training of witches, but that witches are being trained, and he is only too happy to hire them out if the price is right... There are few respectable occupations open to young women without family, and Lowood’s founder hoped to address that deficiency. Not everyone is suited to be a governess.” [loc. 796-822]

My second novel based on Jane Eyre, following SF romance Brightly Burning: Sharon Lynn Fisher's Salt and Broom retains the original novel's setting in 19th-century England, and presents heroine Jane Aire as a witch. Summoned from Lowood (where she teaches other orphaned girls the elements of herbal medicine and protective spells) to Thornfield, Jane tries to make sense of her brooding, widowed employer. She has been employed to unravel 'the recent mysterious and unsettling events in the neighborhood', but the stories she hears from Thornfield's staff -- about the late Mrs Rochester, about her doctor, about 'fairy pranks' -- hint at something darker.

This was an intriguing reimagining of the original story, with an excellent sub-plot about Jane's unknown parents and how their absence has shaped her character. Fisher's depiction of Thornfield, with its ruined church, poison garden and hawthorn trees, was splendidly Gothic and very atmospheric. Even the (predominantly female) minor characters had personality, and though I was ... let's say 'surprised' ... by a revelation about a cat, it fitted well with the unfolding plot. A few jarring Americanisms (the stoop outside a door, 'huckster') but nothing too egregious: an enjoyable and well-plotted novel with plenty of surprises and some solid herbalism.

Fulfils the ‘The other book with the similar plot’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge. For this pair of prompts I picked transformative works based on Jane Eyre: the first was Brightly Burning.

2024/060: Sentient: What Animals Reveal About Our Senses — Jackie Higgins

Sentience ...describes our ability to sense the world around us.... [it is] the foundation on which the mirage of consciousness shimmers. Scientists and philosophers debate whether animals experience consciousness, but most readily ascribe to them the pared-down version of sentience. [loc. 36]

Contrary to received wisdom, humans don't have five senses -- modern cognitive neuroscience suggests that there are more than twenty, possibly as many as thirty-three. Higgins uses a number of examples from non-human animals such as mantis shrimp, star-nosed moles, cheetahs, spiders and octopuses to explore various senses and compare the human and animal sensoria. The mantis shrimp, it turns out, has four times as many colour photoreceptors as the average human, but may actually have 'worse' colour vision: Higgins discusses not only the mantis shrimp (especially an experimental subject named Tyson) but colour-blindness and tetrachromism in humans.

Each of the twelve chapters discusses different sense in the animal and human worlds: 'The Common Vampire Bat and Our Sense of Pleasure and Pain'; 'The Cheetah and Our Sense of Balance'; 'The Common Octopus and Our Sense of Body', and so on. I found the chapters on hearing (the Great Grey Owl, a bird whose wings scatter sound so that its prey can't hear it coming) and the sense of direction (the bar-tailed godwit) most intriguing -- and of course the chapter dealing with the octopus, whose arms can function independently of its brain.

Sentience is packed with case studies and examples, from neurology to zoology (Oliver Sacks is one name that recurs throughout) and discussion of the similarities and differences between human and animal sensoria. Human senses, it turns out, are more flexible and more inclusive than I'd believed. There is some examination of how the perceived world -- the umwelt -- might differ according to the senses available to a particular organism: imagine tasting with your whole body, like a catfish, or hearing the high-pitched sound of your own nervouse system... I found it fascinating, though the Afterword (starting with the duck-billed platypus and concluding that, with technological advances, 'a brave new world of sentience awaits') felt rather slight after the in-depth discussions that preceded it.

Fulfils the ‘glance’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

‘Our brains are tuned to detect a shockingly small fraction of the surrounding reality,’ said the neuroscientist David Eagleman. ‘The interesting part is that each organism presumably assumes its umwelt to be the entire objective reality “out there”. [loc. 3805]

2024/059: Brightly Burning — Alexa Donne

'... the Rochester certainly has a lot of mysteries.' Three cats, one inhuman laugh and a possible saboteur, to name just a few. And now the captain. Young and odd and unpredictable. [22%]

A young-adult science fiction romance, based on Jane Eyre. Here, Stella Ainsley is seventeen, impoverished, and working as a teacher and engineer on the Stalwart, a ship orbiting Earth. It's one of a fleet: Earth is shrouded in ice after a super-volcano eruption, and only a lucky few have escaped. Stella has relatives on another ship, but after she was orphaned by an epidemic she was transferred off to the Stalwart -- a ship she is pretty sure is going to fall apart soon. When she is accepted for the role of governess on the Rochester, she leaps at the chance to escape.

In this version of the story, Hugo Fairfax, the captain of the Rochester, is only a couple of years older than Stella: the child she is to teach is his sister, not his daughter. Hugo (who loves books, and also loves to drink) is a typical brooding YA romantic hero, and personally I felt Stella would have done better with her friend Job back on the Stalwart. But Hugo's arrogance isn't unchecked: members of his crew become as important to Stella as her feelings for Hugo, and the secrets they keep are vital to the plot.

This was an enjoyable read, and it was interesting to see how Donne remixed the original to produce a solid adventure-romance with an unexpected finale. I did feel the pacing was uneven -- especially the last couple of chapters, which were hectic -- but the subplots were fun, most of the characters (especially the artificial intelligence RORI) were interesting, and the SFnal setting felt fresh.

Fulfils the ‘A plot similar to another book’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge. For this pair of prompts I picked transformative works based on Jane Eyre: the 'other book with similar plot', Salt and Broom, will be reviewed soon.

2024/058: Where the Wild Ladies Are — Aoko Matsuda (translated by Polly Barton)

I want a special skill, a power that I can wield with all my force when the time comes. I don’t mind what kind of creature I am. It doesn’t bother me if I stay as a nameless monster. [loc. 91]

A collection of feminist, or at least female-centred, short stories by Japanese author Aoko Matsuda, fluently translated by Polly Barton: the stories are interlinked by references to a company run by a Mr Tei. This company remains nameless, but seems to employ both the living and the dead, ghosts and non-human supernatural creatures. One of their products is an incense which allows a bereaved human to see their lost loved one as they were in life: this incense is the focus of one of my favourite stories in the collection, 'Loved One', in which Mr Tei visits a customer to find out if there is 'some issue preventing [the incense] taking effect'. The narrator has no sense of smell, and the only creature she mourns is her cat Tortie. Mr Tei promises that the technical team will adjust the incense so that it's not limited to human beings -- 'a truly embarrassing oversight on our part, a bug in our system that we've been too short-sighted to recognise'.

Elsewhere we find fox-spirits, vengeful ghosts (and a pathologically jealous wife who learns that she'd be perfect as a vengeful ghost, and would it be all right for the company to approach her once she's dead?), as well as a giant toad that protects women; a young lady whose aunt advises her to reject the beauty industry's blandishments and focus on her own power; and a number of women who find, or bestow, peace and kindness after their deaths. And a delightful sapphic romance between a skeleton and a living woman. There are definitely feminist themes here, but perhaps the major theme is of finding a place to be oneself, and to belong -- whether that's in this life or the next.

Many of the stories are drawn from Japanese folklore and ghost stories: references to the original stories are provided, and the Introduction provides context for the telling of ghost stories in summer, during the Buddhist festival of Obon, when the deceased return to wander the earth (and when the chill of a well-told spooky story can offset the summer heat). 

You can read a couple of the stories on the Granta site: here is 'Smartening Up'.

Fulfils the ‘a yellow spine’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

Fulfils the ‘A short story collection in translation’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/057: Traveller's Joy — Victoria Goddard

(Hal should, perhaps, have asked more questions, but he was a gardener: he planted seeds, and waited for them to grow. He could have asked more questions, and perhaps a few things would have been very different as a result. But he was not wrong to wait for what came from the seeds planted in hope, either.) [loc. 544]

A novella, possibly a short story, set before the main sequence of Greenwing and Dart novels, and told from the viewpoint of Hal, who has not yet revealed to his friend Jemis Greenwing that he is an Imperial Duke. (For that matter, their friend Marcan has not yet 'fessed up to being the second son of the King of Lind.) The three set off on a walking tour after the appalling finale of Jemis' time at Morrowlea University: not much happens, but there is friendship and comfort, some intriguing foreshadowing, and plenty of botanising. This was a delight, albeit a brief one, and prompted me to reread the entire Greenwing and Dart saga...

2024/056: The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez — Ann Swinfen

My whole life was a lie... but now I was play-acting again, this time as a servant boy, messenger for a renegade Catholic, who had entered the country illegally and was offering his services to the Scottish queen. Except he wasn’t. [p. 219]

London, 1590: Christoval Alvarez has lived in Duck Street, near St Barts Hospital, for some years, after fleeing the Inquisition in Portugal with his father: they have shared a life of secrets ever since. Jews have been banned from England for three hundred years, so Christoval -- Kit -- and his father attend church with the Christians: and the two share another secret which would surely doom them both. 

A gifted physician, musician and mathematician, Kit is drawn into the web of spymaster Francis Walsingham, initially to assist with deciphering encrypted messages, but later to carry altered documents and entrap the players in what will eventually be known as the Babington plot. Kit is uneasy with the deceits involved, afraid of secret (possibly double) agent Robert Poley, and exhausted by Walsingham's demands: he'd rather be at the playhouse with his friend Simon.

Swinfen's descriptions of Tudor London are evocative, and her depiction of Kit's life has depth and credibility. There were a few typos ('pouring' over documents, 'leant' a hand, 'few if none') and I wasn't wholly convinced that, even in Tudor times, it would take more than an hour to walk from Tower Hill to Lombard Street -- or that it would be any quicker on horseback. But I can forgive these minor errors, for The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez was a gripping read, with some hefty moral issues and plenty of derring-do. I'll read more in this series.

Fulfils the ‘The word “secret” in the title’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

2024/055: The Lost City of Z — David Grann

...in Fawcett’s mind, what he had been taught his whole life about the superiority of Western civilization clashed with what he experienced beyond its shores. “I transgressed again and again the awful laws of traditional behavior, but in doing so learned a great deal..” [loc. 650]

In which journalist David Grann becomes fascinated by the story of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the Amazon jungle in 1925 (along with his son and his son's best friend) while searching for a mythical Lost City that he codenamed Z. Grann does a certain amount of following-in-the-footsteps, but he's as intrigued by Fawcett's failings as by the legends that were his obsession.

Fawcett (who travelled with a stone idol, gifted to him by H Rider Haggard) was, by all accounts, a martinet: he was also somewhat less racist than his peers, though still couldn't quite accept that any 'superior civilisation' in the hidden depths of South America might have arisen independently of white Europeans. He respected the 'Indians' who dwelt in the forest, and adopted many of their medicines and their survival techniques, surviving where others failed. His final expedition most likely ended in a swift death at the hands of an unfriendly tribe.

What I liked most about this book was Grann's reactions to Fawcett's story, from his own expedition into the Amazon -- perhaps discovering the city that Fawcett searched for -- to his research in the archives of the National Geographical Society, and his interactions with the present-day inhabitants of the area. Grann includes a good overview of the history, ecology, geography and anthropology of the Amazon (coincidentally, I was listening to a novel featuring Sir Clements Markham just as his name popped up in The Lost City of Z) and, though he clearly admires Fawcett's singlemindedness, he's also critical of his approach to exploration.

I read an interesting article about how this book is 'a very long way from the truth': I'm willing to believe that, but it is still a great adventure story and very readable.

Fulfils the ‘Mobile’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge. People exploring are ... on the move.