abbie_'s Reviews (1.79k)

I absolutely devoured this book, a cutting blend of memoir, religion and politics. Blending the personal and the political is something Nadeine Asbali was forced to become uncomfortably familiar with when she decided to start wearing the hijab in a country that claims to have ‘multicultural’ aspirations, but remains stubbornly hostile to anyone not conforming to so-called British ideals. 

As a British-Libyan Muslim woman, Asbali, as she puts it, lives at the dangerous intersection where racism, Islamaphobia, misogyny and white saviourism all converge. When she decided to start wearing the hijab, Asbali was staying with family in Libya over summer, surrounded by women who had made the same decision. But when she returned to the UK, she was met with everything from dismay to outright hostility and abuse. Teachers confused her with the one other hijabi student, men shouted at her from cars to ‘go home’, white women weaponising misplaced concern for her freedom.

Asbali is such a fantastic writer, her style ridiculously engaging, passion pouring from the pages. She makes points so clearly that it makes you wonder how people can continue to argue against such sound logic. I loved the point made about how Asbali refuses to combat racists commenting on her non-Englishness by whipping out trump cards like her white mother or evenings spent eating potato smileys and baked beans. Doing so would be to assert that those who are racialised in the same way but do NOT have these trump cards, somehow deserve to be discriminated against. 

Veiled Threat is set up into chapters that cover a vast array of issues that Muslim women contend with on a daily basis. From the damaging, one-dimensionality to Muslim women’s representation in the media (subjugated, trapped and suppliant or literal terrorist), to the dangerous rise in misogyny among Muslim men thanks to online ‘alpha males’ (read, predators) like Andrew Tate. This chapter was particularly compelling, as Asbali laments how Muslim men, who should represent a safe space for Muslim women, buy into internet misogyny and the vitriol spews from a new and unexpected direction. At the same time, she unpacks the structural failings that lead young Muslim boys straight into the arms of men like Andrew Tate. There is no room for nuanced portrayals of Muslim masculinity in a world that only wants to paint them as barbaric.

I loved how Asbali is able to clearly demonstrate the double standards upheld by white British people. The mental gymnastics people go through to continue to serve their own agenda. White women wax their legs and wear heels? That’s an autonomous decision, and absolutely not rooted in patriarchal beauty standards. A Muslim woman choosing to wear a hijab? Oppressed. Forced. Incapable of making her own decisions. But wait - a 15 year old Muslim girl is groomed and runs off to join a terrorist organisation? Oh no, that child actually is capable of making her own decisions, not our problem.  Muslim women are subjugated and in need of the west to save them - until they are not.

I’ve rambled enough, basically loved this book, wish more people would pick it up!

The Grief Nurse was a total cover buy for me and I rarely do cover buys - but Oxfam had a 4 for 3 deal on and nothing else had caught my eye 👀 I’m glad it was essentially free because it wasn’t really my cup of tea. (Again, I’m pondering my unwillingness to DNF in 2024.)

It’s a quiet fantasy novel which hinges around the idea of grief nurses, children born with the ability to siphon off (rich) people’s grief, despair, sorrow, so they can live happily and be ‘Bright’, unencumbered by annoyances like grieving your dead child etc. It’s told from the POV of Lynx, a young woman working as a grief nurse for an aristocratic family whose fortune is running out. It was unexpectedly queer which is always a nice surprise, but that didn’t make up for the lack of urgency. Like there was definitely a plot but I struggled to care about it. The idea of siphoning off a person’s grief is interesting, but nothing about this world is explained - why did people start wanting rid of their grief? How did grief nurses come to be? How do their powers work?

An interesting premise, engaging writing, but missing something crucial for me. 

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for my free digital ARC! Japanese literature almost always hits the spot for me, so I was disappointed that this one left me underwhelmed. It’s a short book, almost a novella, spanning four seasons and chronicling 20-year-old Chizu’s move to Tokyo from a small town. She moves in with a distant family friend, 70-year-old Ginko, and the pair strike up an uneasy alliance. Chizu is a difficult character to root for. I’m usually all in for a character bumbling through their twenties, not knowing what it is they want or even who they are yet, but lord she was tough to like. She was often unnecessarily rude to Ginko as well, like hello this lady is letting you live in her house for a pittance?! Not particularly memorable I’m afraid, though the translation by Jesse Kirkwood was smooth as butter. 

Apparently this book inspired a recent queer movie which I may have to check out, as I really enjoyed the concept. The fact the book is told from the POV of a straight man did get in the way of my enjoyment somewhat, as there are frequent unnecessary references to the love interest’s firm round buttocks, as well as a few off-putting references to her looking like a school girl.

Cis-het maleness aside, this is a quick-paced, atmospheric little read! It didn’t creep me out but it was definitely haunting and more than a little melancholic. It was also unexpectedly tender-hearted for a ghost story.

I thought the translation by Wayne P. Lammers was pretty good, everything flowed along quite nicely, though some of the dialogue felt a little clumsy.

I rarely consume adaptations, but all the reviews are saying that the movie is so much better, so I think I’m going to have to dive in to that and see what the fuss is about!

Although I really enjoyed this book in the end, I feel like the marketing speak in Spotify's subtitle did it a bit of a disservice initially. They call it a 'gripping' family drama - family drama, yes, gripping... Hmm. I felt more like it meanders, which had I not anticipated being gripped would have been a-okay! But as it was, perhaps not the best choice for an audiobook. I can see myself rating this one higher had I read it in print. 

Yara is a young women who finds herself at a loss. She grew up in a Palestinian-American household which was eventually torn apart by a secret abotu her mother she herself revealed to her father. Seeing the strict confines her mother was restricted to, Yara determines to live her life on her own terms. When she marries Fadi, it first seems like this might be possible for her. But as their family starts and Fadi's worklife becomes ever-more demanding, Yara feels like she's doomed to repeat her mother's life.

Her frustration reaches a boiling point one day at work when a colleague makes a racist comment and Yara calls her out on it. Predictably, Yara is the one hauled in for a 'word'. It's a downward spiral from there, which Rum depicts with a lot of heart. Yara's struggle with depression is raw and real, something the audiobook narrator does a good job of conveying too. 

Rum explores an interesting question of, what happens when you find your life mirroring a cultural stereotype? When speaking out about your issue would 'confirm' the prejucides white people around you hold about your culture? Do you speak out and risk validating racists, who are incapable of viewing things at an individual level? To them, the struggle of one Palestinian-American woman is the struggle of ALL Palestinian women. Or do you keep quiet and repeat the cycles of intergenerational trauma? This is something Yara has to grapple with, and hash out in therapy - something I rarely see people do in books! You really do root for Yara. Perhaps Fadi makes this easier by being the way he is. Fadi is possibly one of the greatest* gaslighters of all time (*worst). 

When I reach for A Woman is No Man, I'll definitely go for the print copy. I look forward to it!

I've developed a not-so-great pattern with Marie NDiaye's work where I read something that blows me away (LaDivine, That Time of Year), but then immediately that's followed by something either incomprehensible or straight-up dull (La Cheffe, Among Family). Vengeance is Mine falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, along with Self-Portrait in Green. There are flashes of brilliance, passages that sweep me up in their creativity and rhythm, only to then unceremoniously dump me into ten pages of confusion, head-scratching. 

Vengeance is Mine is sort of a legal drama. Maître Susane takes on a case for a man she may or may not know, whose wife has been charged with murdering their three children in cold blood. Such a premise makes it seem impossible that certain portions of this book would send me to sleep, but here we are. Maître Susane becomes obsessed with figuring out whether she and Monsieur Gilles shared a life-changing encounter when she was an adolescent, while accompanying her mother to one of the houses she cleaned. Her parents don't want to talk about it, convinced that something inappropriate happened, whereas Maître Susane thinks something positive happened. It's very odd, a tad unsettling. There's also a semi-related storyline where Maître Susane is attempting to get a visa sorted for her undocumented cleaner.

The strongest part of the novel by far were the sections featuring the woman who has killed her children. There's a devastating monologue which highlights the boxes mothers are placed into, the ridiculously high pressure they're under, and the suffocating nature of mothering. 

Jordan Stump has translated most of NDiaye's works, and at this point I think he just has to. Her style is so strange, so opaque, I feel like other translators would blanch at the thought. There are passages where rhythm is SO important, that to mess up the translation of that would be to completely butcher the impact. 

If ambiguity is not your thing, don't bother with this one. There's an interview with NDiaye which I found quite funny where she fully says she knows nothing further about her characters than we do. Everything she knows is there - real intentions? Loose ends? Marie NDiaye does not care, her characters let her in on their secrets as they see fit. 

Confusing and perhaps not worth the time I spent trudging through it. But will I continue to seek out the rest of NDiaye's oeuvre? For those stunning moments of genius, yes.

When I read An Apartment on Uranus, I knew immediately that Paul B. Preciado is 10000 x smarter than I am. I went into Can the Monster Speak? knowing this, yet still felt way out of my depth. Despite being much shorter, since Uranus was an essay collection there were some essays that felt more within my grasp. This book is a furious missive, with all of Preciado's anger fuelled at a room of psychoanalysts who view him, a trans man, as a person suffering a mental illness. I believe Preciado originally gave this speech at a psychology conference but was literally booed off stage before he could finish. That in itself should tell you that psycoanalysis is in need of complete overhaul. 

My favourite part was Preciado talking about his transition as escaping one set of boundaries only to be hemmed in by a brand new set living life as a man. Gender really is some fuckery. 

A lot of it did go over my head, and would probably benefit from a reread plus some further reading to grasp fully. 

My thanks to Netgalley and ECW Press for my free digital ARC!

It's 1901 and Ada is a young schoolteacher desperately seeking to leave her scandalous past behind. She finds a fresh start in a tiny rural town where Christianity and tradition reign. Ada, with her queerness and love of natural oddities, flora and fauna, slots into her new life uneasily, but willing to try to put her past behind her. She manages for a while, until unsettling visions (grisly malformed animals, swarms of insects) begin to plague her. 

Lowry Bridge one of those places ruled by a small group of pious women, who know everyone's business, and anyone who fails to live up their nigh-on impossible standards is snubbed and shunned. One of those people is Mrs Norah Kinsley, a mysterious widow who befriends Ada. I loooooved Norah, and honestly wish we had more from her perspective. Maybe Elliott Gish fancies writing another book focused more on her. 👀 I loved Ada's character though, so was more than content to stay in her head for the whole book. Though the cast of characters is large, Gish does a superb job of fleshing them all out and making them unique. The children Ada teaches are vibrant and lively (except for Muriel who is ethereal and haughty); Ada's father, absent for most of the book, manages to be ominous, cold and calculating even in his absence; Agatha, a sunshine ray of a woman wasted as the meek wife of a reverend. 

Ada's slow descent into madness is gripping. As she's tormented by some unseen being, the line between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly blurred. Gish takes what it means to be an upstanding, well-mannered woman of the early 20th century and grinds it beneath her bootheel. She explores sexuality, sensuality, freedom, the restraints placed on women then (and now), and how a woman might break free of those restraints. It's beautifully written, deliciously creepy, unsettling and infuriating. 

It is a very slow burn though, so go into it with patience and you will be rewarded!

I started listening to this one by the pool in Gran Canaria and it was fine when my surroundings were sun and palm trees… but then I got home and was back to audiobooking while I walk my dog at 5am in the dark 👀 Definitely gave me the heebie jeebies! 

I’ve listened to 4 books by Tiffany D. Jackson now, all up to now thrillers/crime/mystery, so I was intrigued and then impressed by this foray into horror. The atmosphere of unease she creates is superb, and at one point I felt genuinely frightened. I liked that she toes the line between paranormal and real horrors, and at no point did I know where the story was going!

I wasn’t 100% enamoured with Marigold, the main character. She behaves very selfishly at times, including making her best friend commit a felony?? 😂 Tbf, Tamara gives into that way too easily. There’s also a friend she makes in her new town for purely selfish reasons, and then something happens to them and they’re simply never mentioned again. A few little loose strings like that did feel unresolved by the end.

Like I mentioned earlier, White Smoke does a great job balancing creepy horror scares with real life boogeymen - corrupt politicians, laws that target Black and brown people unfairly, racism, mob mentality. Good anxiety rep too! But just a few too many straggling plot points for me to feel totally satisfied. 

I was having a browse through some reviews of this one when I finished it and saw somebody comment that it would make a great limited TV series, and that immediately made me realise why it didn’t resonate with me as much as I thought it would. It has that almost-cinematic feel, where it sometimes seems like the author is writing specifically to see a scene played out on TV. The random forbidden romance thrown in, the draggy middle section, the coolly evil instructors, a lot of it feels written with a TV show in mind. And don’t get me wrong, it’d be a bloody compelling TV show!

Frida makes a huge mistake while looking after her daughter one day, but instead of a slap on the wrist, the state makes her participate in a newly rolled out programme to rehabilitate bad mothers. Separated from their children for a year, the mothers are sent to a defunct university campus to undergo 12 months’ of brutal training to become the best mothers they can be.

I enjoyed the commentary around issues like racism and misogyny, and obviously the sheer volume of responsibilities heaped on a mother’s shoulders (dads get more lenient punishments). But the middle of this book dragged so much. Chan obviously had a very clear idea of the school’s syllabus, but honestly I feel like the amount of description lessened the impact.

Frustrating and eerie, but not as powerful as I anticipated.