abbie_'s Reviews (1.79k)

I prefer single-authored short story collections, as it can be jarring jumping from one author’s style to the next. But anthologies can be very helpful for discovering new authors and sampling their work. Not all the stories in Picador’s Book of African Stories worked for me, but there were a few gems, I got to try out the work of some authors I’ve been meaning to pick up, and I discovered some I’d never heard of but would definitely like to read more from now. I also appreciated the geographic scope of the collection, with most of Africa covered and almost half of the stories in translation too! Although being printed in 2002 it is quite male-centric and there are zero queer stories here.

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Notable themes that crop up throughout the anthology are corruption, hypocrisy, colonialism, belonging and divides (between men & women, Black people and white people, rich and poor). A few of the stories felt too on the nose in their moral offerings, more like a kids fable where there’s a clear lesson at the end. I’ll give you a quick rundown of some of my fave stories:

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🇰🇲 Comoros - The Revolt of the Vowels by Aboubacar Ben Saïd Salim, tr. from French by Carole Beckett

One of the few fantastical stories in the collection, vowels decide they’ve had enough of their forced participation in exploitation, war and violence and go on strike, meaning most of the world can now only communicate by grunting.

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🇨🇬 Republic of Congo - The Ceremony by Emmanuel Dongala, tr from French by Norman Strike

This was a hilarious piece of political satire, following a man who wants to join the Party because he fully believes in their values and absolutely not because he wants a pay rise and a nice car. Highlights how corrupt officials will say anything to bend reality to their own agenda.

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🇪🇹 Ethiopia - Letter to My Sisters by Fatmata Conteth

Sad but striking, a qualified doctor writes her suicide note because she’s tired of the sexist double standards that have ruled her life.

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🇰🇪 Kenya - Minutes of Glory by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

I’ve been wanting to try this author’s work for a while now and this story made me really excited about that! It was a brilliant piece about men using then discarding women to improve their own social status, colourism and beauty standards in Kenya.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC in exchange for a review!

If you’re looking for some creepy horror fiction to add as a late addition to your October TBR, consider The Haunting of Alejandra by V. Castro! I had a few stylistic issues with it, but in terms of creepiness and content, I can’t fault that - I had to hold off reading it for a night when my girlfriend wasn’t here as I couldn’t deal with the idea of seeing La Llorona at the end of my hallway when I went for a nighttime wee 😂😂

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Alejandra finds herself struggling with her sense of self and purpose being a stay-at-home mother to her three children, with her husband expecting her to be the perfect Stepford wife. Her suicidal thoughts begin to get overwhelming, and she’s suddenly confronted by a figure in white encouraging her to end it all. I found the merging of motherhood, postpartum depression, Mexican folklore and actual hauntings to be super compelling - and super creepy! Castro’s writing shines the most when she’s delving into the nitty gritty of body horror, demonic apparitions and tension.

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Unfortunately I did think her style falters elsewhere. The dialogue sometimes felt stilted and unnatural, and I often felt like I was being spoon-fed certain aspects of the plot. I don’t like it when things are over explained and the reader isn’t able to infer. I also get that Matthew, Alejandra’s husband, was intended to be a villain, but his sexism came off as cartoonish at times. There are definitely men out there who act like this, but I would have appreciated a little more nuance.

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Concerns aside, I do still think this book stands strong as a piece of horror fiction that’ll have you running up your stairs as fast as you can on a night, while also tackling the pressures of motherhood and the idea of reconnecting to an identity previously denied to you!

This book was absolutely gorgeous, I’m blown away that this is a debut novel! Wandering Souls is a simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting story of three Vietnamese siblings torn from their family in the cruelest way, following them as they try to forge a new life for themselves in 80s Britain.

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You know when the very first chapter of a novel devastates you that you’re in for a rollercoaster of emotion. Wandering Souls might have one of the most powerful opening chapters I’ve read in a long time. Pin moves skilfully between Vietnam, Hong Kong, rural England and London. Anh and her two younger brothers Minh and Thanh leave their family for Hong Kong, the intention being to meet up again later. But as the three siblings wait in the refugee camp in Hong Kong, it’s clear their family has been irrevocably cleaved in two.

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A lot of the novels I read focused on immigration are set in the US, so it was refreshing to read one set in my own country. I didn’t know much about the UK’s acceptance of 10,000 Vietnamese refugees, so I really appreciated this novel not only for its beautiful writing and moving plot, but the insight it provided. Anh’s struggle with survivor’s guilt was also so well done, sensitive and moving - my heart broke for her when she admitted to not feeling like she ‘deserved’ to see the iconic side of London until she’d made her parents proud.

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I loved the structure of it, as interspersed with Anh’s story we have what appears to be the notes of a PhD student or novelist, articles about the UK’s history with Vietnamese refugees, both older and more recent (spoiler alert, Thatcher was being the worst), and absolutely stunning passages from Anh’s youngest brother from the afterlife. These passages seriously made me want to cry every time they popped up, the perfect balance of childhood innocence and the sagacity of an ancestor.

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Just a beautiful novel and I cannot wait to see what Pin comes out with next! 

It’s always a great feeling when a well-loved book lives up to the hype! And bonus points for me if it’s science fiction, not a genre I naturally gravitate to. Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts is gut-wrenching, original, intense and I can’t wait to try their other books now!

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This book is set on the Matilda, a huge space ship which has been carrying the last of humanity to a fabled ~Promised Land~ for generations, home to a social strata uncannily similar to the antebellum South. Aster, a labourer in the lower decks of the Matilda as well as a healer, finds herself in the unlikely position of overturning the oppressive ruling powers of the Matilda, along with Giselle, a heavily traumatised woman, and Theo, the Surgeon revered by the entire ship.

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I loved that Aster was coded neurodivergent, and literally every other person in this book is queer. There are some gorgeous and heartbreaking explorations of gender and sexuality, particularly from Theo. There’s also quite a lot of action (in comparison to the books I usually read anyway), and I found it to be paced well, with plenty of suspense and mystery. Please do be mindful of the triggers though, as this book is also heavy on things like sexual violence, racism, state-sanctioned murder etc. My only issue was the character of Giselle felt a bit underdeveloped and often too convenient.

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For some reason I don’t feel like I have much else to say, except that the writing was beautiful and I was fully invested in this story from page one! Just a bloody good piece of sci-fi that I finally picked up thanks to @openbookopen’s Queer Your Year challenge!

I think this book is the closest thing I’ve read to erotica, a once-banned portion of a French classic that has been re-released as a novella. When Violette LeDuc tried to publish this piece as part of her novel Ravages in 1954, her publisher Gallimard told her the 150 pages could not be published because of the explicit depiction of homosexual desire between two 17-year-old girls at boarding school. The pages were censored and Ravages published without them, but now they’ve been brought to English-speaking readers as a novella.

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I did think that some crucial development was missing, possibly since it had been cleaved from the whole. Thérèse and Isabelle seem to prove there’s a fine line between love and hate, as the enemies-to-lovers trope unfurls faster than I’ve ever seen. Most of the book is centred on their physical relationship over a few days.

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In terms of prose, Sophie Lewis has done a fantastic job - there’s a lot of waves and bubbles and sweetness to be translated, leading to some lovely sentences like ‘‘I was waking to spring with the babbling of lilacs under my skin’. But I found the dialogue to be rather clunky, often it didn’t seem like they were even in the same conversation?

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Clumsy dialogue aside, it is an interesting piece of writing for historical context alone, and it’s also a great portrayal of the all-consuming desire of first, same-sex loves. It reminded me somewhat of Emma Donoghue’s Learned by Heart, as the girls are of a similar age and it captures that ‘this person is everything to me even though I’ve only known her a few days’ feeling.

I have a hit and miss relationship with Jeanette Winterson - Lighthousekeeping was brilliant, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, good, Sexing the Cherry left me absolutely baffled. I’d have to say The Daylight Gate falls beneath them all - I didn’t hate it, but I definitely didn’t love it either. It sits somewhere between historical fiction and fantasy, drawing on the Pendle witch trials but doused in a good amount of horror to make it something of Winterson’s own.

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The main creative difference Winterson admits here is that her version of Alice Nutter is nothing like history’s Alice Nutter. Winterson plays with the idea that these women truly were witches, so expect supernatural and magical elements. But she doesn’t need to exert too much imagination when depicting the violence enacted against women in the 1600s. Some of the descriptions, especially pertaining to Jennet, a child, turned my stomach and I wondered if they were absolutely essential to include. We’re all aware of the violence women suffered during James I’s campaign to wipe out both witchcraft and Catholicism in England, I’m not sure such graphic depictions of r*pe and inc*st added a great deal beyond shock value.

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I’m writing this review about two weeks after I finished it, and all that’s stayed with me is the shock violence. Probably not one I’d recommend off the cuff, but if you have a particular interest in witch trials then this one might offer you something more!

I was hesitant about reading this book via audio, since I knew it was a saga with a large cast of characters. But having the full cast made a huge difference, and I ended up very much immersed in this (rather bleak) novel decrying the oil industry, capitalism and corporate greed. It’s set in a fictional African country, but the devastating problems posed to the village occupied by the American oil-drilling company are all too real. Toxic water, infertile soil, sick babies, governments too blinded by greed to care about its citizens. I particularly enjoyed the chapters narrated by ‘the children’ as a collective, they were very moving. I liked Thula’s chapters too, the young woman who eschewed traditional gender expectations to become a revolutionary, intent on taking back her people’s land. It lost steam towards the end, with Mbue adding a new POV too close to the dénouement for you to fully become invested. Grim and necessary in times of climate crisis.

Thanks to the publisher for my free review copy!

A book about a sapphic relationship *and* motherhood *and* in translation, it was pretty much a given that I’d love Boulder - and love it I did!

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Boulder is one of those translated novels that stops me in my tracks, in awe at the talent it takes to produce such a beautiful translation. Obviously Eva Baltasar’s original Catalan prose was stunning, but when you translate there are so many word choices that could make or break a sentence, so much nuance that could potentially be lost. But Julia Sanches is a master of her craft, and she’s brought Boulder to English-speaking readers in an exquisite manner. The sentences in this book will have you spiralling, just gorgeous.

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Writing aside, the content is fascinating as well. Boulder (a nickname, we never know her real name) is an enigmatic cook on a cargo ship who seems to be drifting through life - until she meets Samsa. Boulder reminds me of a magpie, she doesn’t seem to require much from her partners beyond shiny, happy prettiness. She lets Samsa’s life uproot her own, following her to Iceland and carving out a new life for herself there. But then Samsa decides she wants a baby, and despite Boulder having zero interest in motherhood, she acquiesces.

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I am a person with very strong feelings about my childlessness, so this book evoked extremely strong feelings in me. I was aghast at Boulder capitulating to Samsa’s wants - what good has ever come of not wanting a child but agreeing to have one anyway?? You know it’s gonna end in disaster but Baltasar has you in her grip by this point and you have to stay to watch the inevitable.

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Intense and poetic, couldn’t get enough of it - I was sad it was so short!

An interesting memoir by Britain’s first Black chief constable, the title of which comes from words shouted at him by protestors during the Brixton Riots in the 1981. There’s so much wrong with policing in the UK, but it was fascinating to hear about police work in the 80s and 90s, as well as Michael Fuller’s rise to the top in the face of institutionalised racism. Fuller grew up in care, but against the odds found himself in a home with a supportive caretaker. His first encounters with racism didn’t occur until his first year policing, at which point his staunch belief in the justice system began to falter. Fuller struggled with fitting in in an outright racist police force, while also dealing with hostility from the Black community, who understandably did not trust the police. As an older man, I don’t agree with some of his politics / beliefs, but overall this was an interesting read that I’m glad I picked up - good on audio as I think in print the writing may have been too plain.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC in exchange for a review 

I was excited for this one but unfortunately it ended up being a bit of a miss for me. It centres on a messy love triangle which perhaps should have tipped me off, as that’s not my favourite thing to read about… But I was drawn in by the promise of queer relationships and also different types of relationships and loving one another.

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My main issue with Mudflowers is that it felt too self-conscious. I could see the painstaking care the author took over each word, every placement, and that unfortunately conveyed a stilted and overwrought tone to the prose. Some things were over-explained and it felt like it was trying too hard to be introspective. I also don’t like it when authors go ‘Then he did something that really upset me… He did X’. It’s like my petty little readers’ ick, just really irks me 😂

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However, I did like the exploration of shifting dynamics in friendships, relationships and situationships. Where there was once banter and emotionally & intellectually stimulating conversation, the next moment no one wants to challenge anyone for fear of upsetting a precarious truce. Some of Sophie’s (the narrator) reactions felt a bit childish, and I’ve already forgotten how old she was supposed to be.

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Also, I’m not sure what the deal is with North America, but for a UK reader, reading the ableist ‘sp’ slur to describe movement (multiple times!!) is extremely uncomfortable. Please retire this word from your vocab 🙄