Book Review: My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time, by Liz Jensen

It's 1897 and lady-of-the-night/morning/afternoon Charlotte comes up with a brilliant idea to enable her to afford enough fine dresses, food, and schnapps to get through the cold winter. She and Fru Schleswig, a woman who followed her to Copenhagen from the orphanage she grew up in, claiming to be her mother, will clean the home of Fru Krak, a local widow with delusions of aristocracy. Fru Frak, soon to be married to a pastor, is fond of daytime shopping trips; with her out of the house, Charlotte will steal and sell as many of the Kraks' valuable ornaments and household goods as she can.

But after Charlotte hears some intriguing stories about the missing and presumed dead Professor Krak, she can't keep herself from investigating the mysterious locked basement. What she finds there is a device that saves her life and transports her, rather roughly, across time to modern day London, where her adventures continue in a way she could never have imagined.

I had a lot of fun reading My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time, and it was a great choice to take on holiday. I loved the premise, along with Charlotte's personality (though not her penchant for ampersands) and shameless money making-schemes. She is a very funny narrator, vain but charming, bold and cunning. But as the story progresses, she becomes less active and more of an observer, and although I still enjoyed it, I felt that some of the magic was lost as the tale progressed.

I think it was largely the fault of the love story, which seemed very rushed. Charlotte meets her lover, and in the space of a few pages, they are in a serious relationship. It seemed like the author wanted to focus more on the time travel, which would have been fine except that Charlotte has little interest in either the mechanics or in actually travelling all over time and the world. After some initial excitement, she doesn't even seem that thrilled by modern-day London, and she doesn't spend much time exploring it, which was a shame because I really wanted to see what she thought about my home. There are other characters that do more in the way of time travel, but we only find out what they got up to through Charlotte.

I would still recommend it to people looking for an amusing, easy read. It's an entertaining, silly adventure, with a few mysteries along the way.

Book Review: The New Girl, by Emily Perkins

In an unnamed town, during a hot, dry summer, Julia, Chicky and Rachel are celebrating the end of school and waiting for the exam results that will determine their futures, whilst trying to decide what to do next. Although their town is dull - so boring that they sign up to a free class at the local library - it's a difficult place to leave. Everything they've ever known is here, and only Julia really thinks that she might leave, inspired by Miranda, their beautiful, charming new teacher.

But Miranda is no angel, having come to escape the city, and the mistakes she made at university. She seems like a positive influence, a breath of fresh air with big ideas and pretty dresses, but the longer she stays, the more her darker side comes out, and her presence cannot remain benign.

The main protagonists are Julia and Miranda, though the novel cycles through many other points of view. I found them both really interesting. Miranda is a narcissist dressed up in Manic Pixie Dream Girl clothing - black hair, fringe, and all. She enjoys inspiring people and getting them to adore her. She's convinced that she knows best and doesn't care about the emotional fallout of her actions. Julia is naïve but intelligent, and she knows that she has to leave the town if she wants to do anything really exciting with her life, though she has a strong emotional connection to her friends and family, especially Chicky, Rachel, and her mother.

I also loved reading about Julia's mother, Mary, who had Julia when she was young, and is now a kind woman who loves her daughter and husband, but is aware of everything she missed out on by staying in the small town. She struggles with her husband's lack of interest in their daughter, and with the possiblity that Julia might leave.

There were some characters that I would have liked to read more about, and some scenes that seemed skipped over. When Miranda first comes to the town, she goes to meet the local women, most of them mothers, at a party hosted by the woman who hired her to teach, Gretchen. We only get to read about the party before Miranda arrives, and I would have liked to have seen how it went. I would also have liked to find out more about Chicky and Rachel, especially Chicky, who is brash and brave and yet seemingly content to stay in the town.

I'd like to read more books that deal with these type of issues - books about deciding what to do next, about the mistakes new adults can make when dealing with people who have been adults for a lot longer than they have. If you like the idea of 'New Adult' but not the fact that most of the books sold under that category are romances, give this a try and let me know what you think, though it is literary fiction - rather than NA or YA - because the story is sometimes told from the parents' point of view. If you have any recommendations for me, please do leave a comment!

Book Review: St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, by Karen Russell

If there is a more intriguing title out there than St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, well, I'd love to hear it, but I'd also be surprised by it's very existence! When I saw the spine of this book in the shop I couldn't resist picking it up. It's a collection of short stories, and one of the review quotes on the back cover mentions Angela Carter, who is one of my favourite writers. I took it straight up to the till. It took me a few months to finish, as with all short story books. I started reading it when I was reading a novel that was too large to cart around on the tube and it made a great travel read, as it's quite slim and easy to slip into.

The stories are not connected but what they do have in common is their magical realist atmosphere and quirky settings. Most of the stories draw on mythological or supernatural ideas and almost all the narrators or protagonists are teenagers, predominantly boys, but there are a few girls, most notably in the title story.

As I've written before in other reviews, I have issues with short stories and novels which feel like snapshots of a character's life rather than complete stories in their own right. I can't say that I didn't have issues with the abrupt endings of some of the stories in St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, but Karen Russell's imagination is so fantastic and her ideas are so interesting that I didn't mind that much.

 

My favourite story was the title story, 'St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves', which is about a pack of girls, the human children of werewolves, who have been sent by their parents into the care of a group of nuns, who give them new names and try to teach them to behave as humans are supposed to. I also loved  'Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers', about children with both magical and non-magical sleep issues, and 'from Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration', which is narrated by a boy whose father is a Minotaur. 

I won't say anymore because at least half the fun of reading these stories comes from discovering the details! I would like to read more of Karen Russell's work, but her novel, Swamplandia! is based on one of the stories that I wasn't quite as keen on, so I might skip that and go straight to Vampires in the Lemon Grove, her second short story collection.

Book Review: Five Miles From Outer Hope, by Nicola Barker

6ft 3in 16-year-old Medve lives in a decrepit old hotel on an island in Devon, with her father and her younger sister and brother. Her mother and two elder siblings are elsewhere in the world, and Medve appears to be quite happily running things back at home, as much as they can be run with minimum effort, until a red-haired South African stranger, going by the name of La Roux, appears to disrupt things and drive Medve to frustration and humiliation.

Five Miles from Outer Hope is a weird book. I quite often really like weird books, but ultimately there was too much that seemed to be missing from this one for me to rate it as anything above 'okay'. I enjoyed it for the most part, I didn't get bored, but I found it unsatisfying in the end, even a little bit irritating.

It's literary fiction, and the blurb is completely ridiculous. 'An instant classic of teenage self-discovery' it says, of a book I'd never heard of before and only read because I happened to pick it up in a shop! So when I turned the first page I was anticipating a certain level of pretentiousness, but happily, it's not all that pretentious. It is quite funny, in places, although some of the humour is of the gross out, vulgar variety, and I didn't really laugh more than once at the quirks of the different family members.

Unusually for literary fiction, I found the teenage voice to be really strong. Medve's character comes across really well in her narration. But there were far too many italics. Italics, in my opinion, should be used for occasional emphasis, but in Five Miles they were used so frequently they became pointless very quickly. Maybe the author was trying to make it look like Medve herself, thinking it was a cool thing to do or something, had written it down like that, but I just found it annoying. Otherwise I liked the style of the writing, it was well balanced between description, interior monologue, and dialogue, and there were some really great descriptive sentences.

I know why Medve was chosen to narrate the story - it's about her growing up and possibly falling in love - but to be honest, I found her to be the least interesting of the bunch. She's vindictive, has issues with her older sister Poodle/Christabel, and wants to be the queen bee in the family, as much as she refuses to admit it to the reader. Yet I was more intrigued by the almost-intellectual, devious, Patch, who Medve initially writes off as being needy. La Roux had a whole history that was continuously hinted at, sometimes briefly delved into, but never fully explored. I also wanted Big, Medve's father, to have a bigger part in the story. I didn't feel like I got enough of an idea of what he was actually like as a parent most of the time.

I was about to accept that this book was an overgrown snapshot-style short story (the kind I generally don't get on with), until I got to the italic section in the last few pages, which jumps into the future like an epilogue. It places the rest of the novel into the context of Medve's whole life, and raises more questions than it answers. This part just made the whole thing seem ever more odd and unsatisfying as a novel. A lot that I would have quite liked to read in more detail was just skipped over.

I don't think I'll be rushing out to try another book by this author, but other readers might really like it. If you do like what I call snapshot short stories, those that focus on tiny segments of  characters' lives, then you might enjoy Five Miles From Outer Hope, especially as you do get to find out what happens afterwards in this one. It is a short novel with less than 200 pages, so if you're a fast reader you won't be risking much time.

Book Review: We Had It So Good, by Linda Grant

Photo by Scott Thompson

We Had it So Good is a novel that has several main characters, but is focused on Stephen, an American who comes as a postgraduate student to Oxford in the Sixties. There he meets his future wife, Andrea, and her friends Grace and Ivan, and although he is scientifically-minded, he joins their hippie group and even starts to use his skills to manufacture LSD. It all goes well until he gets sent down (that’s Oxbridge for ‘expelled’) for tearing a page out of a library book, and is conscripted into the US army. Luckily for Stephen, Andrea is willing to marry him so that he can stay in the UK and avoid the draft, and so the novel follows this quartet as they grow up and move through life, finding careers, having children, and dealing with their family histories. Stephen and Ivan seem to find life the easiest, with families that are happy to look after them, whereas psychotherapist Andrea is trying to move on from her difficult childhood, and the glamorous, self-centred Grace is attempting to run away from her own past. The novel also features Marianne and Max, Stephen and Andrea’s children, as they begin adulthood in the present day.

I really enjoyed reading We Had It So Good. The characters were very interesting and believable, and although I found Stephen to be the least fascinating, I still thought he worked well as a focal point, with his family history playing such an important part in the way he sees the world. I thought that this novel had the right balance of description, emotion, and dialogue. Although the pace is slow, it works well with the style. The is not a novel with a gripping plot, there are some mysteries about the characters for us to chase through the pages, but on the whole the quality of the writing, and the themes of the novel, were what kept me interested. This is a portrait of a generation of the middle class (lots of reviewers just call We Had It So Good a portrait of a generation, but I have to point out that it’s a generation of the middle class, working-class experiences were different) that was full of contradictions. They start off their adult lives embracing counterculture, but end up almost defining convention, as middle-class clichés. They were lucky, but not grateful. They felt guilty about their children’s problems, but didn’t do anything much about them, perhaps considering them as inevitable as their own good fortune. I found it quite annoying that Stephen lacks ambition, expecting good things to just come to him, and doesn’t really make his own ‘big’ choices. His life is arranged at the start by his father, and later, his wife. It’s not that they control him, far from it, but that he lets them solve his problems, and ultimately design his life. Although she is an irresponsible, overly self-assured person, I actually had more respect for Grace because of this. I’m not sure whether this is exactly what the author intended, or if it’s just me being young and idealistic! I suspect it may be a combination of the two!

I only have one real criticism. The story is told in slightly-disconnected scenes, which is a very concise method of storytelling, but I didn’t really feel like I had a full sense of what family life was like for any of the characters. Stephen’s story pretty much begins when he leaves home to go to Oxford, and Marianne and Max don’t get much childhood in the novel, just a couple of scenes. This may just be a matter of personal taste, but I like to see how characters interact, and learn how they feel about each other that way. They all have definite opinions of each other – Stephen can barely stand Grace, Grace can barely stand everyone else, Marianne is afraid that her mother will make her analyse things she believes just are, Max finds his father too loud – and you do get to see Stephen and Grace’s irritation in action, but not very much of Marianne negotiating conversations with her mother, or Max enduring his father’s loudness. My favourite scenes were those that involved interactions between Stephen and his father, Si. I liked that Si was even more straightforward than Stephen felt himself to be, and that this made Stephen feel and act slightly awkward around him. I would have liked to know more about Stephen’s mother and his sisters, but to be fair, Stephen is on the other side of the Atlantic to them for most of the novel.

A much more minor thing that bothered me was the repetitive reminders of certain things. I hadn’t forgotten that Stephen had tried on Marilyn Monroe’s mink stole as a child 100 pages, or even 200 pages later. I hadn’t forgotten that Andrea had only ever gone to bed with Stephen either, yet that fact was repeated over and over as well. I guess that I was supposed to feel that these things were playing on the characters’ minds but the reminders weren’t accompanied by much in the way of contemplation.

We Had It So Good was the first title to be selected for the new Virago Book Club, and I received a copy to review through the First Look programme. If I’d never heard of Linda Grant, and was looking at bookshop or library shelves to choose something to read, I wouldn’t normally be interested enough in the subject matter and time period to take it home. However, I have read good reviews of some of Linda Grant’s other books, and I have a copy of The Clothes on Their Backs on my TBR, so I probably would have read We Had It So Good eventually. I am glad to have been sent a copy to review as I got to read it much sooner!

Book Review: Girl Meets Boy, by Ali Smith

I am reviewing this book today because it is Blog Action Day 2010, the issue this year is water, and water is a theme in the story. Please check out the Blog Action Day website and/or my post on this second's obsession for more information.

Photo by forever never comes around.

Girl Meets Boy is part of The Myths series, a retelling of the myth of Iphis, from Ovid's Metamophoses. Iphis is a girl brought up, secretly, as a boy. She falls in love with another girl, Ianthe, and when she and her mother pray to Isis for help, she is transformed into a man. Iphis marries Ianthe, and they live happily ever after. I am completely obsessed with retellings of myths, legends and fairytales, so for me this book was an absolute must read.

There are two first-person narrators in Girl Meets Boy, sisters Anthea and Imogen (or Midge), who take the helm for alternate chapters. The first to be introduced is Anthea, remembering her grandparents, particularly her grandfather, who liked to tell them stories about when he was a girl. In the present day, Anthea is struggling to find her place in the world. Imogen has gotten her a job at the company she works for, Pure, but Anthea hates it. Anthea is an essentially unconventional person, drawn to the weird and wonderful, whereas Imogen is concerned with appearances and fitting in, excited by Pure's bottled-water ambitions. Anthea is just about managing to pretend to be normal - in front of her colleagues, anyway - until she makes a faux-pas at a meeting, and on her way out of the Pure premises, meets beautiful graffiti-protester Robin.

Girl Meets Boy is primarily a love story. It's about people falling in romantic love with other people, people falling in love with life and all it's possibilities, and familial love. It's a very short book, so there isn't time for it to get overly slushy - in fact, I had mixed feelings about the length. On the one hand, I wanted more from some of the novel's elements. I wanted to know more about the grandparents - it seemed like their stories could fill a book or two alone. The initial meetings of the lovers are brushed past quite quickly, and it was a bit annoying, I actually wanted to read what happened immediately after Anthea set eyes upon Robin by the Pure sign. On the other hand, the poetic style of this writing probably works best when applied to a snapshot of lives, it could seem stilted after too long, and the very obvious messages presented in the book didn't need any more hammering home! To be honest, I always find it difficult to criticise very short books - they're quick to finish, and easy to read and re-read. Girl Meets Boy is a lovely read for an afternoon, and I will probably read it again.

I loved the characterisation in Girl Meets Boy, from the grandparents, to similar-but-different Anthea and Imogen, Robin, Paul, and the supporting cast of morally awful Pure employees and happy-to-comment passers-by. It all seemed true to life. I find it really interesting when retellings manage to do away with divine intervention, replace it with realism, but still keep the magic in the story, and Girl Meets Boy definitely achieves this.