elementarymydear's Reviews (967)

 Love is Colour is a delightful collection of thirteen short romantic stories, ten of which are based on folk tales and mythology from around the world, particularly from West Africa. Bolu Babalola’s approach is a unique one: rather than taking the plot of the tales and transplanting them, she takes the characters and themes and uses them to create a story in which women have their own agency, which led to many a delightful twist!

Read this and more reviews on my blog!

Although it’s a fairly short book, coming in at just under 300 pages, it’s definitely worth taking your time over and only reading one or two stories at a time. They all have vastly different settings and characters, and I enjoyed them all the more for having space between each one to really absorb each story. At the back of the book there is a list of the origins for each story, and for those I wasn’t familiar with I googled the original after reading Babalola’s version. Not only was it good to expand my knowledge and horizons with traditional tales, but it was very interesting to compare the short stories to the source material.

As with all short story collections, they can’t all be winners, and you’re bound to enjoy some more than others, but there weren’t any that I outright disliked, perhaps just some I was indifferent to. Initially my favourites were Attem, Scheherazade, Thisbe and one of the original tales, Orin, and after reading the author’s note at the back Zhinu also made its way up there. The way that Babalola weaves in the distinctive features of each myth were sometimes profound, sometimes entertaining, and always brilliant. For example, in Thisbe, Pyramus and Thisbe are next-door neighbours in a college dorm, where a crack in the wall means they can hear the goings-on in each other’s rooms. In Zhinu, the myth is originally about the constellations, so Zhinu is a literal ‘star’ in that she is a rising celebrity.

The real stand-out feature of this collection, however, is Babalola’s skill in the short story itself – especially romantic short stories. There were thirteen romances in this book, and each one of them was tender, heartfelt, and subtle. The characters and their settings were all vividly painted, and over the course of about twenty pages for each story she took you on their journey.

My least favourite story in the collection, which unfortunately did let it down a bit for me, was Nefertiti. I knew from reading other reviews that this was the only story with queer characters, and with a sapphic romance. Not only did I struggle to really connect with the characters and story in this one, but I wasn’t a fan of the setting – a misandrist mafia-style gang. As I said before though, it’s very rare to find a book of short stories where they’re all winners, and it certainly didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the other stories.

If this collection is anything to go by, Bolu Babalola is an ingenious writer, and I can’t wait to see what she writes next! 

 
Researchers from the future travel back in time to meet Jane Austen and rescue a lost manuscript? YES. SIGN ME UP RIGHT HERE.

Read this and other reviews on my blog!

This book was just so great. It follows our main character Rachel, a disaster relief medic from the distant future, who is recruited for a mission to go back in time, befriend the Austen family, and rescue Jane Austen’s completed manuscript for The Watsons, previously thought to be left incomplete. It delivers on every aspect: the sci-fi element is enough for a convincing premise without overpowering the story, a glorious fish-out-of-water scenario in Regency England. Rachel and her research partner, Liam, get to live out a fantasy every Austen fan dreams of: speaking to, and getting to know, the elusive Jane Austen herself.

Rachel was a great character to read from, and it was gloriously entertaining to see her and Liam try to assimilate to life in 1815, from dressing the part to hiring servants to trying to keep up with the etiquette. The amount of details and thought that the author has clearly put into every aspect of the story, drawing on everything we know about the Austen family and what they were all doing in pretty much every month of span of the novel which really helped to bring everything to life and root it in reality. It gave the time-travel/research element a lot more credibility too, and helped us understand what was true and what was fiction about these people’s lives.

It wouldn’t be a book about Jane Austen without a romance, of course! Not only is there a great romantic subplot between the two main characters (made even more entertaining and suspenseful because they’re posing as brother and sister), but there are proposals, love triangles, scandals, everything you would expect!

If you love Jane Austen, you will love this book. It’s the perfect blend of original and Jane-Austen-inspired. I had a massive grin on my face the entire time I was reading it because it was just so glorious! 

 I hugely anticipated reading this book; I’d heard only positive things and I couldn’t wait to get stuck in. After a slow start, this book delivered and then some. The first fifty pages or so were quite dry and I briefly considered DNFing but I’m so glad I didn’t!

Read this and other reviews on my blog!

Rather than being about the sisters themselves (which is what I thought based on what I’d heard) the main character is actually Jude, the daughter of one of the sisters. Stella and Desiree, the twins at the heart of the novel, are quite elusive; it isn’t until the end that we really get a grip on who they are. As a result, it wasn’t until the second section of the book that the story really gets going, but BOY does it get going. I pushed through the first few chapters but I was barely able to put it down for the rest of the book. Jude is a fantastic character to read from, and her evolving relationship with Reese is a beautiful subplot. Kennedy, the daughter of the other sister, is fantastically awful but has a vulnerability to her that is occasionally endearing. The dynamic between the two of them is fascinating, especially as Kennedy begins to come to terms with their family relationship.

Brit Bennett has managed to paint an incredibly layered picture of life, not just about family tensions and secrets (which she writes so brilliantly) but how those family dynamics intersect with race, colourism, and gender identity. Jude, despite living in a Black community, suffers for having darker skin than those around her, while Stella, who has lied for her entire adult life about her race and family background, is fearful when a Black family move in across the street that somehow her secret will be revealed. Meanwhile we have Reese, a transgender man, accompanied by Jude on his journey to live his own authentic life.

I could spend hours unpicking the threads of the different social and cultural themes that weave together so effortlessly in this book, but instead I will take them with me past the final page, mull them over in the coming weeks/months/years as this book sticks with me, and leave the analysis to the sociologists and literature students who have the words and the know-how to coherently lay out those ideas. In the meantime, I urge you to pick up this book; it’s beautiful, poignant and powerful. (And once you’ve read it, please please tell me so we can discuss said social and cultural themes!) 

 This book.

THIS. BOOK.

I was absolutely bowled away by this. It exceeded by already high expectations, and I know it will stay with me for months if not years to come.

Read this and other reviews on my blog!

The Penelopiad is Margaret Atwood’s take on the story of Penelope, Odysseus’ wife. While Odysseus was off being the protagonist of the Odyssey, Penelope was left at behind in Ithaca, left to fend off suitors who invite themselves over and take advantage of her maids. When Odysseus returns, he kills the suitors (of whom there are over a hundred), and then hangs twelve of the maids.

The story is told from Penelope’s perspective as she wanders through Hades, having watched over two thousand years of human history go by, but even though she is the narrator, and the title character, the story isn’t actually about her. The story is about the twelve maidens who were hanged for being women sullied by the enemy. They are a literal Greek chorus, interrupting Penelope’s narrative to recite verse, sing sea shanties, do a tap dance, or perform a Gilbert-and-Sullivan-style number for us. It’s very weird, very Atwood, and very effective. Only one of them is named; they are an otherwise anonymous ‘chorus line’.

The presence of this chorus line of the twelve maidens was for me the standout feature of the novel. They made it unsettling and unpredictable. They added an immense power to the narrative, sometimes subtly, sometimes very much not. Their presence turns the book not just into a telling of Penelope’s story, but into a critique of whose story gets told and why.

It’s a very short book, coming in at just under 200 pages with not much text on each page – I read it in under two hours – but it sucks you in, keeps you glued to the page right to the very end, and what a punch that end is. It is a masterclass in having a huge impact with very few words. I’m almost tempted to immediately read this again, to glean even more nuggets from it. Needless to say, I’ll be thinking about this for a long time, and almost certainly returning to it again and again.