Fantasy

Families, relationships and societies: August 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors

I picked this book in my library because I had been seeing it everywhere for a while – a bit like it happened with Normal People back in the day – I wanted to know what all the fuzz was about.

After reading the blurb, I was mainly interested in two things. First, New York as the setting. I’m a city person (I was born in Madrid, after all) and New York is one of the most interesting cities I’ve ever been in. Second, this book focuses on the relationship between a woman and a man twenty years his senior. I am interested in relationships with a big age gap. I was born to one of those and I’ve been in one for almost a decade.

The first chapter was interesting – very sharp writing, good dialogue. It’s narrated from the perspectives of both Cleo and Frank (actually it took me a bit to get used to the switch of perspectives in the same chapter, but this happens all along the novel, so it wasn’t a problem in the end). Their encounter, on New Year’s Eve is quirky but sweet, and these two different characters are introduced by the way they dress and speak to each other.

Almost immediately we jump into a wedding scene. Cleo is twenty-four and Frank is forty-four. She’s a British painter who has moved to New York and is struggling to make a living on her art after finishing her university studies (I mean, yeah, as a fellow artist I sympathise, it’s a hard world out there). Frank is a successful marketing executive with his own company who’s starting to make big money. Ah, also, he’s an alcoholic.

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A month of travels and rain: July 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Speculative Fiction

July was a very busy month – I was travelling most of it, first to Iceland (thanks for letting me stay with you Beth!) and then to Belgium and the Netherlands. This was also a very stressful month for many other reasons so I didn’t have much time to read at all. Whenever I get very stressed I go to the mind-numbing pleasure of crocheting instead. Here I’m including the two books that kept me company during that time (even though I technically finished them both in early August).

Gideon the Ninth by Tasmyn Muir

The moment I learned that this book was a bout lesbian necromancers in space I had to read it. This is a good example of how you can make any idea work if you are a skilful writer. I’ll be definitely using it as an example to encourage my students to think out of the box when they write horror and SFF – they don’t need to write carbon copies of well-known books like The Lord of the Rings or It by Stephen King, there’s so much potential within these genres to let our imagination run wild and write about whatever takes your fancy.

Because this book works. Oh, yes it does. It’s a dark, necromantic, nerdy Hunger Games of sorts with a narrator I adored from the first page (because she’s so wonderfully extra, so confident, such an optimistic) and many other characters that you won’t forget.

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Enlightment: April 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Speculative historical fiction

Small things like these by Claire Keegan

This is a novella, so a quick read, yet it left a big impression on me and I’m still thinking about it. Set in Ireland in 1985 it follows Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in a small town where everyone knows each other. The day before Christmas he goes to the nearby convent to make a delivery and finds something in the coal bunker that shouldn’t be there. Hence, he’s faced with a dangerous moral decision – to speak up against the nuns, who are very powerful members of the community or keep living his life as quietly as he’s used to.

This dilemma is a powerful one – to tell the truth and stand up for others often requires a sacrifice that not many of us are willing to make. Being good and decent can also mean paying a high price. It’s easy to empathise with Bill from the very beginning because he’s a hard-working man with the best intentions. He has an interesting upbringing many would have frowned upon back in that time – his mother had him when she was sixteen years old and while working as a maid for Mrs Wilson the richest woman in town; he doesn’t know who his father is. Against all odds, Mrs Wilson lets mother and baby stay in her household and acts as a sort of kind relative towards them both. As an adult, Bill has a job, a wife, and five daughters. All of these are important details that will foreshadow the protagonist’s final decision.

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A month of magic and dispair: March 2023 Reading log

Book Review, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Speculative Fiction
Photo credits: Neil Rolph

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

“What is it like to be you? I need to say: This is the question that has made me a writer; always that deep desire to know what it feels like to be a different person.”

Elizabeth Strout

When I used to work in a bookshop, Elizabeth Strout was an author that many of my University friends came for. They’d get every book Strout published, telling me how much they adored her writing. I remember shelving those same books. The covers didn’t seem particularly attractive. When I read the blurbs I wasn’t especially inspired either. Once we got a review copy of Olive, Again and instead of reading it I gave it to one of these friends, who was very, very happy.

Fast forward to March 2023 – I saw Lucy by the Sea in the library. I picked the book just to try and see but very much doubted it was going to be my thing. Where to start? Strout is one of those authors that manage to imbue a certain hypnotic quality to their writing that traps you, no matter how interested you really are in the characters or the plot. She’s similar to Haruki Murakami and Sally Rooney in that regard. Especially to Sally Rooney, even though she writes about a demographic that’s in their sixties and seventies, rather than late twenties and thirties (I suspect Rooney’s characters may grow with her as she keeps writing them, though?)

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