Red at the Bone was an emotional and immersive read. It feels quite poetic at times which is helped with the short paragraphs and dialogue in italics to keep the flow going. The book examines how two families come together with a teenage pregnancy and the birth of baby Melody. It jumps between the narratives of Melody, her parents Iris and Aubrey, and grandparents Sabe and Po'Boy. It weaves a history of the family together through the different narratives dating back to 1921 and the Tulsa race massacre, but mostly centres on Iris's teenage years and melodies sixteenth birthday in 2001 Brooklyn.

The novel excels in the family relationships it builds as we see from multiple sides the bonds between grandparents and grandchild, father and daughter. We see the distance that exists between Melody and her mother Iris and how this came to be. It examines how a family comes to be formed and extended. It questions what it means to be a parent, grandparents and the sacrifices family make for each other.

The division and dysfunction in the Mother-Daughter relationship was particularly prominent. This was my second book recently that has focused on divisions within this relationship and how ideas of ambition, freedom and hope all tie into this relationship and can serve to sever it. The last one I read was Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena.

It's not only the bonds between family that are central to this novel though. Jacqueline Woodson also focuses heavily on class, race and sexuality. She uses the characters of Aubrey and Iris to contrast the hardships and opportunities that may come because of wealth and social class. She examines neighbourhoods, education, jobs and the change over time in these places and experiences because of class.

Particularly through the character of Iris she also explores sexuality of a young black women, examining at what point she becomes sexually active, how this breaks the mould of her Catholic upbringing, and how she comes to explore identity and sexual orientation.

This book is short, but offers a wealth of themes, emotions and most importantly strong characters and familial bonds. I enjoyed the prose and structural style immensely and will definitely be returning to Woodson's work.

If I Don't Have You follows Kayla, a Black British woman who is an artist trying to make it in New York City. Ren is a sexy, film director who feels that he's sold himself out to make big blockbuster films as he struggles to recover from heartbreak and deception. The two meet as Kayla interviews Ren about his new film and the pair end up spending an unexpected evening together which alters their feelings and attitudes to love and life. However, things are not so straight forward as the novel pans out and both have deeper issues to deal with.

The structure of the book helped to build up a realistic relationship between the two as the chapters alternated between Ren and Kayla's perspective. There were also several time jumps which helped to draw out the romance over a reasonable time to make it more natural.

Admittedly I did struggle a little bit to begin with, to get into this one but I think that was partly my mood when I first picked it up. As the book progressed I became entirely absorbed in Ren and Kayla's narratives. Whilst I went into this expecting a fluffy romance it actually ended up offering much more than that. It looked at trust, openness, self-belief, creativity and personal journeys.

There were moments of sexiness that made the romance sizzle but I found myself most drawn to their email exchanges, their odd letters and the long distance communications between Ren and Kayla. This built and developed their relationship. There was some heat, but how they opened up in these moments made me especially emotional.

If I Don't Have You was a fantastic romance that I thoroughly enjoyed. I'd really recommend you give this one a go.

Soviet Milk was such an unexpected delight. I picked up this book having read no reviews and just being entirely taken in by the blurb and the setting as I've never read any Latvian fiction. The novel follows a trio of women: daughter, mother and grandmother in Latvia under Soviet rule. The mother is the central character; her main focus in life is becoming a doctor and we see as she attempts to make strides and developments in gynaecological science under Soviet rule. She's a rule breaker from the beginning of the book as well as deeply troubled with her role as a mother and her own mental health. The book takes a twist when she ends up banished to the countryside and restricted in her ability to practice medicine.

The structure of the book is clever as it slips between the mother and the daughters narrative. I actually found the daughter's narratives the ones I was most drawn to and almost eclipsing the mother's as the centre narrative. The book has no chapters but frequent break points to symbolise the change in narrative and character. This serves to deepen our understanding of the fractured relationship between mother and daughter. The lack of chapters also serves to keep the narrative flowing freely and keep you deeply absorbed.

Where Soviet Milk begins to truly shine though is the symbolism and the parallels that are drawn between the motherland (Soviet Russia) and motherhood. One particular scene has the young girl describe a drawing her mother has made of a baby united with its mother by the umbilical cord and she discusses the happiness this relationship brings. However this is in sharp contrast to her own relationship with her mother that is fraught with distress and distance, often incredibly dysfunctional. We see how the girls mother struggles across the novel and this is reflected in how the Soviet motherland is growing further apart from Latvia.

The book serves as an excellent critique on the Soviet state and communist rule in Latvia. It uses metaphors and allegory to demonstrate how Soviet rule trapped and depressed the citizens of Latvia. How it subdued their culture and life. The women also serve to show how Latvia moved from free state under the grandmother, to Soviet rule under the mother and freedom eventually with the daughter.

Beyond the allegory and political critique this book was just a beautiful written exploration of love and motherhood, of family. It was examined three generations of women and the bonds between them. It was about strong women who challenged the expectations and confines that were placed on them by the state and their position.

This book was an utterly fantastic historical read and fiction book that explored motherhood, family and freedom centered on Latvia under Soviet rule.

Wow, Exit Management is not the type of book I've been reading lately, but this book got beneath my skin and dragged me into an exploration of the darker sides of human nature. This book explores class, compassion, xenophobia, ambition and how our choices come to haunt us. There are three core characters that the novel centres around. Jozsef, an old man who escaped Budapest under communist rule who now lives in London with a nice house, and a fine art collection. Then there is young Callum; he's an innocent at heart, he lacks direction in his life and his job as a GuestHouses worker brings him into contact with Jozsef. There he befriends the elderly and ailing Jozsef who is seeking company and support as his health begins to fail. Finally, there is Lauren who is driven by her need to escape her working-class roots, haunted by events in her youth and seemingly obsessed with the future.

The novel explores as these three characters lives intersect and how ambition and compassion come into conflict and can result in life spiralling out of control. The novel certainly touches on the darker sides of life as we see Lauren's drive to succeed impact on her choices. Her job is based in human resourcing and her speciality gives the novel its name Exit Management. She gets rid of people and this already gives the novel and her character a sinister feel. She's an interesting character when paired with Callum who appears much more fragile, compassionate and unambitious it almost makes her actions so much worse.

However, for me both characters had issues with their life directions, with their actions and with their past to resolve throughout the novel. I think the novel also served to engage with ideas of image; how we view ourselves, how we view others, how we want ourselves to be perceived, how we enable other's perceptions to guide our actions, choices and lifestyle. I think this novel really portrayed these sinister edges of life as we saw Lauren driven by her desire to continuously impress her boss Mina and follow her 'code to success'. By the end of the novel, it didn't feel as though everything were resolved, but it wasn't all dark and despairing.

The ideas of class and xenophobia were seen most strongly in the sections where Lauren talked about her roots and when she returned to her family in West Yorkshire. These chapters I liked as this is really close to home for me and dipped into the working-class background, the poverty, the problems and the xenophobic attitudes that exists in some of these communities. I wish we'd had a little more of Lauren's roots and the West Yorkshire setting as I feel that places outside of London are often overlooked in books. These attitudes and themes were also mirrored in Callum's roots and his family back in their flat in Clapham. I thought this was quite clever as it mirrored two different areas of the UK but highlighted how the same problems existed in both.

The style of the book was a little disjointed to begin with as there are shorter chapters and choppy staccato sentences, mixed up with longer more flowing passages. The dialogue is all in italics so it was sometimes difficult to work out who was speaking but this served to keep the flow of the novel and keep the pace. And as the novel went along I became much more immersed and unable to set it down.

Overall I found Exit Management an enthralling read with many themes and some really complex characters to dig into it. It felt sinister and dark at times, but then it also felt real and haunting. There is a lot to unpack from Exit Management but well worth a read when released on September 10th 2020. Thanks to the publishers Dead Ink Books for a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book was a whirlwind of a read, I fell in love with Jane Eyre in a way I didn't expect.

For me, this is the first Brontë book I've read and was the one I was recommended as easiest to get into. I was thoroughly surprised by the readability, some of the modern behaviours and dynamics of Jane Eyre's character and the feminist undertones.

The first 350 pages were entirely 5 star for me, however, after Jane fled Thornfield Hall I have to say I found the pacing a little slow and the characters a little annoying. Overall I enjoyed the arc back to the end, but didn't really appreciate the different interlude and the direction Jane's character development went in.

I will definitely be trying another Brontë book soon, and I am very happy about how unexpected this was.

Shatila Stories by Omar Khaled Ahmad, Nibal Alola, Safa Khaled Algharbawi, Rayan Mohamad Sukkar, Safiya Badran, Fatima Omar Ghazawi, Samih Mahmoud and Hiba Marei (tr. Nashwa Gowanlock)

Shatila Stories is a collaborative work of fiction that was organised by Mike Ziervogel and Suhir Helal who went out to Shatila working with the Lebanese based charity Basmeh & Zeitooneh to run a short writing course and publish a work from a group of Syrian writers.

The logistics weren't without difficulties but the end result is a collection of stories that can sit individually as more classic short stories but interweave a tale of connected lives and narratives that range in length and style across the book.

The narratives reveal the hardships of those within the Palestinian Shatila refugee camps, camp structures, daily lives, but also family, friends, loved ones, and independence and success. Relationships are constructed across the stories and tug on the heartstrings as we go along.

These stories are designed to draw you into the heart of Shatila and have been written by nine refugees. They all received advances and royalties for the work produced and were aware their stories would be woven into a more overarching collaborative fiction piece.

These stories were immensely heart-warming and sad and it felt quite special to read them over a series of days as I delved in and out of the various stories told and immersed myself in Shatila. I think both short story fans and shorter fiction lovers will enjoy this beautiful collection.

""I have been racking my brain to figure out what's different about you and I got it."
"My hijab?" I said sarcastically.
"No, it's that you somehow walk in like you're a man."
"A white man."
"Yes, a white man."
Constantly being underestimated has always been helpful to me. It was really hard for him to imagine that a ninety-pound refugee hijabi could be confident enough to walk into a leadership role of a caucus whose most important incumbent she defeated."

Ilhan Omar above all is a fighter, that much is clear from her memoir. The memoir is funny, sad, so openly honest and so very interesting as she recounts her early childhood in Somalia, her family fleeing to Kenya during the civil war and time spent in the refugee camps, her move to America in her teenage years and her time through the American education system before she eventually became engaged with politics. The different phases of her life are clearly split out and Ilhan shares so openly how at different points she changed her relationships with her family, her religion and her own ambitions. Her journey has clearly not been easy but the memoir is so deeply absorbing.

Even when she made it to Congress she had to overturn a 181-year-old ban on headwear in order to be allowed to wear her hijab in Congress. She's faced countless threats, been physically attacked and suffered great loss in her life. However, her strength, her resilience, her determination to fight for a better America shine so brightly in this memoir.

It's an incredibly readable memoir, and she's an absolutely incredible woman. The whole thing left me in tears and in awe. I don't have much more to say as I don't think you can rate memoirs, but this book is about an utterly fantastic woman. She cares so deeply about her community, her beliefs and her people and I think that shines through in the book. Even if you're not interested in American politics, this is about her life, her family, the Somalian community, the Muslim community, being a Black woman, a mother, a refugee and more. I 100% recommend this book to everyone.

"Pride, strength, and responsibility - all of those notions are the domain of people in comfort and safety. When you're facing death, you're not guided by your importance or your past, and you certainly don't worry about whether your pride is intact. Again and again, I witnessed that if you can push through whatever is happening today, tomorrow might be worse, but it could also be better. The only option for the human spirit is to keep going."