Memoir

A Queer Summer: July 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Non-binary Lives, edited by Jos Twist, Ben Vincent, Meg-John Baker and Kat Gupta

(If you notice a theme on my reading for July it is because I raided my library’s showcase of queer books for June…)

This is an edited collection of essays. One of the editors is Meg-John Baker, a British author I keep finding every time I manage to get my hands on books about non-binary experiences. This particular collection has different sections, ‘cultural context’, ‘communities’, ‘the life course’ and ‘bodies, health and wellbeing’. The writers behind these essays are all quite diverse in terms of background, class and race – and their experiences of a non-binary life are very different.

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There’s more than one side to a story: June 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Queenie by Candyce Caty-Williams

Perhaps because the cover I have of this book is neon pink I was convinced it would be a sweet romance but this ended up being much darker and dramatic than I could have anticipated. Also, I loved this book much more than I thought I would, even if I sometimes wanted to scream at the main character (red flag, RED FLAG! RED FLAG!!!!!) 

Queenie is a twenty-five-year-old English girl from a Jamaican family living in London. She has what many of us would consider a dream job – she works as a writer for an important newspaper. She has a group of supportive friends. She lives with her white boyfriend in a flat they rent together. All seems perfect but it couldn’t be further from the truth. She’s struggling with her relationship – her boyfriend is slowly breaking up with her, saying she’s ‘too intense’ and accusing her of always messing up things with his family (who are a bunch of, well, entitled racists, for the most part, but also the kind of racist people who would openly deny being racist…) She may not be able to be who she really is around her family. At work, her bosses would discourage her from writing anything remotely political or critical because they don’t think there’s an audience for it. As for her friends, not all of them are as supportive of her as it may seem; her friend Rebecca for example seems to secretly enjoy lending her money whilst at the same time questioning a lot of her life choices (for context here, Rebecca is white from an affluent family, Queenie is the first person to go to university in her family and has been brought up by her grandparents and her aunt as she has an absent mother and a father she never knew).

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On injustice: March 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Horror, Nature Writing, Queer Literature, Speculative Fiction, Speculative historical fiction

Toto Among the Murderers by Sally J Morgan

I picked this book because it was intrigued by its premise: it’s partly based on the encounter its author had with the infamous murderers Fred and Rose West in the 1970s. Sally J Morgan was a young girl hitchhiking who decided not to get in their car – but was impacted by the encounter – as she later learned what she had really escaped from.

This novel is about women, the relationships they share, and the sexism and cruelty they faced in 1970s England (which actually, still feels pretty relatable these days).

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Parents, Families and Trouble: February 2024 Reading Log

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

Nettle and Bone by T Kingfisher

I really enjoyed T Kingfisher’s writing style when I read The Twisted Ones, so when I got this book for my birthday I was really looking forward to it – especially as some of my friends said they thought I’d love this one even more. They were right.

First of all, this is a revenge quest, and I have a thing for revenge quests. I adore them, there’s something about getting what you are owed in the end that I just– yeah, I know life is not often like this, which is perhaps why I really like characters to get some retribution in fiction.

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Experiencing the thin places: November 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Nature Writing, Speculative Fiction, Speculative historical fiction

Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

This was a reread – I came by this story back in 2014, when I was researching unreliable narrators – before that I watched the film adaptation when it came out in cinemas in 2007.

On this second read, I enjoyed the story even more. First of all, Barbara Covett, the narrator, is so interesting. She’s a twisted and opinionated sixty-something year old History teacher in a secondary school who becomes obsessed with her younger new colleague, Sheba Hart.

At first glance it may seem that the focus of this novel is the illicit relationship between Sheba, the new teacher, and one of her pupils, fifteen-year old Steven Connolly. But this is really the story of two women who will end up tied to each other, against all odds.

Hints at Barbara’s lesbianism were even more noticeable to me on this second read. She doesn’t make direct reference to it once but she reveals to be someone who’s maintained a series of obsessive friendship with women exclusively, many of them younger than she is, as it’s the case with Sheba. I believe, though, that Barbara’s intense friendships go beyond sexuality. She likes Sheba and she hates her too because she has all the things that Barbara wants: youth, beauty, social status (which, coincidentally, are many of the things women are socialised to crave from a very young age, specially the first two).

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