abbie_'s Reviews (1.79k)

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

This was my last pick for Women in Translation month and it was absolutely brilliant, one of my favourites of 2023 and one of the best books about motherhood I’ve ever read! It’s been translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith and they’ve done a stellar job, especially given the medical snippets and poetry throughout.

I’m not a mother and have no intentions of being one, but anyone who wants to come close to understanding what it is to be a mother should read My Work. Ravn exposes the incongruity of the stories we tell about motherhood and what it’s actually like to undergo such a radical process and come out the other side responsible for a human being. The protagonist Anna is struggling with postpartum depression, and the structure of the book is incredible in the way it reflects her scattered mental state.

Anna often is at odds with her partner Aksel, as she doesn’t believe he fully ‘gets’ what it is to be a mother. And it’s definitely true that most men are not shouldering the same amount of mental, emotional and physical labour a mother does when it comes to parenting. When preparing for a child it’s not men who are pummelled by the constant barrage of warnings and risks that could harm the future baby, things you’d never think of like hair dye and chemicals within mattress stuffing. A lot of Anna’s obsessive thoughts revolve around time and how it seems to slip away from her, something I related to hard as I’m constantly aware of and counting time. Ravn’s depiction of anxiety and depression is breathtaking.

I’ve read quite a lot of books about motherhood that don’t shy away from the nitty-gritty, but My Work takes the cake. I’ve never read a book which lists out times and details of Braxton Hicks, which talks about colostrum and all the other details regularly glossed over in media.

Anna is a writer, and Ravn draws on a lot of other women writers who have experiences of childbirth, pregnancy and motherhood to discuss what it means to be a mother and produce art. 

Some of my favourite quotes (taken from an e-ARC):

Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk was an Inuk writer who was initially asked by Catholic missionaries to help them improve their Inuktitut language skills. She began by writing down phrases and terms used in day to day life, but quickly grew bored with her task. Nappaaluk then essentially reinvented the novel, never having read one before, as she invented a whole cast of characters and narrated their daily lives to alleviate her boredom. She stopped her project for 20 years due to ill health, but was later approached by Bernard Saladin D’Anglure, a Canadian anthropologist, who encouraged her to finish her book. Shocking no one, away from the eyes of the Catholic missionaries, Nappaaluk felt emboldened to tackle topics she felt she couldn’t before, so the later chapters of Sanaaq deal with things like sexual relations, conjugal violence and possession by succubi.

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I wish the afterword of this book came before the text, because had I known this I would have felt less frustrated by the repetitive nature of the book. But once I learned that it was initially a language-learning exercise, the synonyms and repeated phrases all made much more sense. She was trying to get as much vocabulary and as many grammatical and syntactic structures in there as possible! Sanaaq was transcribed and translated first into French by D’Anglure, and then from French into English by Peter Frost to be published 2014.

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Content-wise, Sanaaq is straightforward, narrating the day-to-day lives of a fairly large cast of Inuit characters. They fish and hunt and grow old and fall ill and marry. The titular character is strong willed and fiercely protective of her daughter, refusing marriage to men she doesn’t care for. It also covers the group’s first contact with white settlers and missionaries, which was very interesting.

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Would highly recommend the audiobook as Tiffany Ayalik does an incredible job bringing it to life. Just such an interesting one both in content and production/historical value!

First of all I would just like to appreciate the format of this book - it’s two short books, one a collection of short stories and one a novella, and instead of just following one another, you reach the middle and have to flip the book upside down and go back to the ‘start’ to start the next book. V fun!

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In terms of actual content, I found the novella, Minna Needs Rehearsal Space, a lot more compelling than the collection of short stories, Karate Chop. I’m writing this review almost two weeks after finishing the book (oops) and most of the stories from Karate Chop have not left much of an impression tbh. The exception being my favourite, the last, The Wadden Sea, where a young girl moves to the Danish coast with her chronically ill mother. There’s some great commentary on the difference in people’s treatment of others with visible versus invisible disabilities and illnesses. Looking back at my notes, I did also enjoy The Winter Garden and Flight. The tone of the stories is always very bleak, characters coming to stark realisations that everything is falling apart and that the status quo never really changes.

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Minna Needs Rehearsal Space absolutely gripped me though. It’s a 90 page novella all told in one sentence paragraphs - reminiscent of Facebook statuses of old (Minna pees. Minna fills her water bottle from the tap. Minna leaves the john.). I can see how this would grate on some people, but I was hooked and couldn’t get enough. I found it impressive how Nors managed to pack such emotional gut punches into these almost-robotic like sentences. Minna, in her thirties, unmarried and childless, is spiralling  under the weight of the expectations placed on her, and her ‘failure’ to meet them. She’s also struggling to deal with her demanding older sister and workplace anxiety, and the short snappy sentences really convey the sense of building anxiety and Minna’s dwindling tolerance for it all.

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One I’d recommend for Minna alone! Probably 2 stars for the short story collection and 4 stars for Minna. 

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#WomenInTranslation

A much hyped collection that possibly suffered from my overly high expectations. Don’t get me wrong, very enjoyable, I just found myself wanting a bit more depth from some of the stories. This collection is all about women and the expectations placed on them, how they are perceived, and there are some truly excellent stories in here. I also appreciated that a good chunk of them are set in and around Newcastle, I always love the familiarity!

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Through these stories Danielle Pender explores themes of motherhood, women at work, friendship, sexuality, and relationships both familial and romantic. We see messy mother-daughter relationships that don’t get better with age, even messier age-gap relationships which in hindsight were even more terrible than they were at the time, extramarital affairs, the trauma of losing your best friend to a car accident as a teenager and more.

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My favourites in the collection were all quite different to be honest! There was Bar Italia, where a woman subverts power dynamics with her affairs, causing one man to throw the funniest temper tantrum ever when he realises he holds none of the power here. Then Paper Dolls, which is the one mentioned above where a teenage girl loses her best friend to a car accident. This one was tragic; Pender does a great job of showing how intense everything already feels as a teenager, then how something so traumatic affects a 16 year old girl.

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But my absolute favourite was Junction 64, set in a Burger King at Washington Services. This was equal parts hilarious and unsettling. Pender absolutely nails the type of ‘lad’ you encounter all too often up here, the awful way their attention makes you feel, how quickly they can turn violent and unpredictable. The atmosphere of someone at work taking a dislike to you was palpable - the main character overthinks everything she says to him for fear of provoking him, but to no avail. There was also a hint of queer desire which I wish was explored more, although simultaneously enjoyed it being just there in the background. Just so much going on in this story and I loved it all!

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Overall a solid collection! 

I just love a book about not very much at all, especially if it includes a claustrophobic descent into madness. On that front, History. A Mess. delivers!

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Translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith, this little gem from Peirene Press chronicles a PhD student’s carefully built thesis (and life tbh) crumbling because of a tiny oversight. She believes she’s found the first female artist in Britain, but six years after painstakingly writing her thesis, she discovers a fatal error made years earlier. Her life’s work threatened, she needs to decide if she should come clean or strive to cover up her mistake. Madness ensues.

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This book doesn’t really have anything in common with Lote by Shola von Reinhold (if you’ve not read that yet, please do), but I was reminded of it all the same. Lots of archival shenanigans and reflections on history - who makes the cut, who doesn’t, how easy it is to write someone out of history (or write someone in 👀). Honestly it’s wild how easily this could happen - historical documents are obviously very difficult to read, pages are lost to time, it could so easily happen that things are misinterpreted and wreak havoc on previously accepted theories, or the opposite.

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In between agonising over her thesis and conjuring mysterious doors in her living room, the main character also spends a lot of energy thinking about her 7 friends, imagining scenarios where she’s not present. I love this close kind of writing, feverish run-on sentences that give the reader an intense intimacy with the protagonist. Pálsdóttir does an amazing job depicting the protagonist’s mental decline in this way.

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The ending was sadder than I anticipated, but also very satisfying! Similar to The Idiot which I reviewed a few weeks back, I wouldn’t recommend this to everyone but I think if you know your tastes and this review piques your interest, you’ll have a good time!

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

It’s pretty much a given that if you hand me a queer historical fiction novel I am damn well going to enjoy it 😌 Everyone (I hope) at this point has heard of Anne Lister, Gentleman Jack, 19th-century lesbian extraordinaire, but there’s still not that much written about her (many) lovers. Emma Donoghue has sought to begin rectifying this with Learned by Heart, which focuses on Anne’s relationship with Eliza Raine while they were 14/15-year-old boarders at school.

Eliza Raine was a mixed-race Anglo-Indian girl, so I did feel a bit hesitant given that Donoghue, though a lesbian, is also white. But she’s done copious research and while the focus is mainly on the closed little bubble of her and Lister’s relationship at school, there is also good commentary on colonialism and the racism & homophobia of 19th-century Britain.

I’ve never read Donoghue before, but I immediately clicked with her writing style. The book is written with 19th-century cadences but it’s not overdone. It’s evocative and the scenes conjured are vivid. She’s also great at showcasing the intensity of teenage love. Eliza and Lister feel like they’re discovering everything for the first time, emotions are heightened, extravagant promises are made wildly and then not kept. While Lister is obviously iconic, she was also a bit of a player and left a lot of broken hearts in her wake. I loved how Donoghue also included the hints that Lister may have been non-binary but didn’t have the terminology for it, which was mentioned in one of my recent nonfiction reads Before We Were Trans - love a bit of serendipity like that!

Lister is just such an iconic figure in queer history and I’m glad for this beautiful new addition, meticulously researched, which also puts a spotlight on a queer woman of colour. I’d love for another book (or several!) which goes into more detail about Eliza’s life after school, which was unfortunately largely spent in an asylum.

Much of Eliza’s writings are lost as she would instruct Lister to burn her letters, but I’m just imagining the other brilliant works that could be written using her life as inspiration! I think I would have preferred it if Learned by Heart only focused on their school life, as there are a few letters interspersed from Eliza to Lister during her confinement as an adult, and I think they deserved more page-time than they got.

Out on the 24th August!

This was a much better choice for 5am dog walks than my previous audiobook - snappy and funny! I read Meaty last year which was okay but a bit bogged down in 2010 humour. This one is better, but the first few essays didn’t win me over, it took me a few to warm up to Irby’s humour. She’s very self-deprecating and ‘adulting is so hard’, but I still enjoyed her frankness about dating and living with chronic illness. If you like toilet humour (honestly I love a funny poop story), you’ll enjoy this collection. Sometimes she does take the joke too far though - like I would find a joke or anecdote funny but then she’d keep it going, trying to make it quirkier and it’d lose its charm. But overall, made me laugh and I’ll still pick up her other two collections at some point!

This was book number 6 for my #WomenInTranslation month reads, and it started out incredibly strong but unfortunately lost some steam around the last third. I struggled to finish it and I’m not sure exactly what happened there, which makes me think it could have just been my mood and I wasn’t concentrating properly. Because genuinely the first half was great!

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Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, Planet of Clay is told from the perspective of Rima, a young Syrian girl who cannot stop walking, so she’s constantly either tied to her mother or restrained elsewhere. She doesn’t talk much, except for being able to recite the Qur’an, but she has a rich inner life filled with drawings & stories. Her world is shattered one day when soldiers open fire on the bus she’s on, killing her mother. She spends the rest of the book being shunted from safe place to safe place (some less safe than others), put into the care of various people who don’t really understand her.

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I’ve read quite a few books set during wars told through the eyes of a child and they never get less harrowing. Rima’s innocence, her adoration of The Little Prince, her rambling, lighthearted tangents, all put the tragedy of the Syrian civil war into even sharper relief. She doesn’t understand everything happening around her, her childish narration of bombings, death, violence are extremely unsettling. Her observations and tales are constantly shooting off into various tangents, she promises us (we’re addressed directly) she’ll return to a certain story later but never does. At risk of sounding like I’m back in GCSE English, the confusion of Rima’s narrative reflects the chaos and tumult of a country in the midst of a civil war.

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Maybe one day I’ll reread this and see if the story really does stumble in the last part, or if it was my issue! One I’d recommend if you have an interest in wartime fiction and child narrators!

My second pick for #WomenInTranslation month was Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, which is a short story collection translated by a team of translators: Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph and Helen O’Horan. I’m assuming that these stories were published in various places before being gathered in this collection, and that different translators worked on different stories. I will say that the tone (or style??) of the stories fluctuated quite a lot, some of them read a little clunkier than others, while some were super smooth and more pleasurable to read.
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I often just pick up books based on vibes, without paying much attention to the blurb. Based on the cover of this one (which I adore) I was expecting these sci fi stories to be gritty and super grounded in our reality. So I was surprised that a lot them are actually set in outer space, dealing with futuristic technology, aliens, intergalactic politics - a fun surprise honestly! It’s very cool that Suzuki was writing this sort of thing in the 70s as a Japanese woman, when the sci-fi scene back then was even more of a sausage fest than it is today.
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A few of the stories admittedly did nothing for me, I read them and then could barely tell you what happened after. There were also a few casual homophobic and fatphobic comments thrown in (at one point a woman character says women aren’t scary ‘except for the lesbians’ lol). But there were a few that were great, very unsettling, questioning traditional gender roles in Japanese society (I swear almost all of these stories had a general undertone of ~men are trash~). Some of my faves were Trial Witch, The Covenant and Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise. I think you can really tell that Suzuki has a big influence over contemporary Japanese writer Sayaka Murata, as she often explores the theme of being an outsider, feeling like you don’t belong in this world.
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Overall a solid collection, a few misses, but I’d definitely pick up Terminal Boredom! 

Given all the glowing reviews of this one I’ve seen on StoryGraph, I think this one may be a case of ‘it’s not you, it’s my choice of audiobook over print’. It’s my own fault for regularly picking up multi-perspective, generational saga on audio even though it’s very rare that type of book works for me in that format 👀 This book covers a LOT of ground and is constantly switching over POVs, and it was clearly just too much to keep track of during my 5am dog walks.