amyvl93's reviews
902 reviews

So far 2025 seems to be the year of dysfunctional family books. This Family takes place on a hazy hot summer day in the wake of lockdown and then peels through this family's life and the how their relationships got to where they are through a range of flashbacks.

The event that has bought everyone together is matriarch Mary's wedding. This has bought to her home in Suffolk her ex-husband Richard, their daughters Emma and Phoebe, their half sister Rosie along with partners, kids and mother-in-laws.

On the plus side, I felt that Sawyer really nailed the sticky feeling of a hot British summer day and the slight haze that tends to cover events on those days. She also did a generally good job of capturing some of the complicated feelings that are at the heart of this book - I particularly liked how she captured the complicated feelings that Emma, Phoebe and Rosie had around motherhood. We also get to see the same events from different perspectives, and whilst this does get slightly repetitive, it was interesting character building. The house at the heart of the novel was also brilliantly bought to life, and felt like a character in itself.

However, I did find that the prose was often a little overwraught and overly descriptive without adding much. I felt that Sawyer really wanted to pull on our heartstrings at times, and this was a bit too obvious in the text, and didn't work on me - in part because I found many of the characters to be deeply self-centred and not particularly sympathetic. Whilst she did a great job of capturing some complicated feelings, at times the narrative seemed confused and wanted to storm towards a relatively neat bow rather than really unpacking the events that had happened to some of these characters (view spoiler). For me to end up feeling the most for a philandering man indicated that something had wrong in this narrative.

I'm all for unlikeable characters, but in this case there was just too high a concentration, with limited pay-off

It's always exciting to finally get to an author that has been on to your 'to-read' list for a while, and Isabel Allende is definitely one of those. A Long Petal of the Sea was released in 2019 and follows the story of Spanish refugees fleeing the Civil War to Chile onboard a boat commissioned by Pablo Neruda. In particular, we follow Victor and Roser Dalmau - he a doctor and she a pregnant pianist forced into marriage by circumstances after the death of her lover, Victor's brother, who loses his life fighting for the Spanish Republic.

This is a sprawling narrative that takes into account events from the 1930s to the 1970s between Spain, Chile and Venezuela, as the Dalmaus search for a new home and belonging within new communities. The story told here is based in part on events in Allende's family's own life and that of her family friends - in addition to the sheer scale of events captured - means that at times the novel reads more like narrative non-fiction than a novel - though this may be more of a challenge with the translation. This did sometimes mean that the reading experience is a little dry.

That being said, I did find the characters compelling even if certain beats of their story became a little repetitive or convenient, with friends or family reappearing in unexpected ways. Both Victor and Roser felt well drawn, and used their experiences to explore the life of refugees and migrants - which is explored further in the characterisation of Marcel, Roser's son born in Chile, and who lacks the connection to Spain that his parents have.

Alongside the story of people, Allende also weaves in the story of Spain and Chile which I found to be incredibly interesting. I knew some of the events captured here but the lens that Allende applies, through both the Dalmaus and a wealthy local family who are frightened of socialism and thrive under Pinochet was really valuable.

In addition to the occasional dry prose, there was also sometimes some casual racist language that I couldn't quite get a sense of if this was due to the 'timing' of the novel, the characters, or an accident of translation - but given the content, and the focus on the experience of people integrating, these felt a little out of kilter with the overall narrative.

It was good to tick this off my reading list - and I'm excited to read more Allende in the future. 

I have been meaning to read some Moreno-Garcia for ages as I feel like her books come up all the time so I was so excited to read Mexican Gothic and was so delighted that this really hit for me.

Mexican Gothic is a delightfully creepy gothic read which follows society girl Noemi who is instructed by her father to visit her cousin Catalina at the house of her husband's family High Tower after they recieve a worrying note from her which is dismissed by her husband, Virgil. Noemi soon finds that High Tower is not at all what it seems. She comes across Catalina's mother-in-law Florence, Virgil's brother Francis and their terrifying, eugenics-obsessed father Howard. They are a family of English people with Spanish banned from within the walls and English soil imported for the garden.

Whilst this is a slow burn at first, I thought that Moreno-Garcia did a great job at slowly building up tension and peeling back the truth of the Doyle's time in their home and what really was behind the success and then failure of their failed silver mine. There were some passages in particular that reminded me of The Yellow Wallpaper in its creepiness and the exploration of Noemi and Catalina being women trapped in this deeply patriachal environment. What is extra interesting is the way that Moreno-Garcia explores colonialism through the Doyle family and what really keeps them all in line - which I definitely don't want to spoil - it is very effective and adds another layer of creepiness to the story of the family.

I really recommend this and can't wait to get stuck into more Moreno-Garcia.

Coming out of A Little Life, Hello Beautiful was a bit of a breath of fresh air to begin with, before it took a bit of a turn which had me scratching my head a little.

Hello Beautiful follows the Padavano sisters, with a story loosely inspired by the story of Little Women. We follows Julia, the driven older sister; Sylvia, the romantic second sister and twins Cecilia an artist and Emmeline a natural caregiver. They grow up in a chaotic home with their parents, into which comes Julia's university boyfriend William Waters and the plot moves from there.

I really enjoyed the first section of this novel. I enjoyed getting to know the Padavano sisters and their chaotic but - what appeared to be - love infused home, and the early days of Julia's relationship with William. After a tragedy happens which draws Sylvia and William closer together, I got a little less enamoured with the book.

I felt that after this plot movement the core relationships between the sisters got pushed to the side. I felt that Napolitano did an interesting job at exploring womanhood in the 1970s and 1980s, and how the sisters responded to this changing environment. However, we are told a lot that the sisters love each other deeply, but this love is apparently easy to turn their backs on - and made me find the comparison to Little Women, where the sisters do at times hurt each other they deeply love each other (and their parents) to be a bit of a stretch. I do think Napolitano did a great job of portraying grief and making some of the more questionable decisions that characters chose make a little more sense.

My biggest issue with the book was the character of William. For someone so pivotal to the plot he is a bit of a non-entity; I felt the portrayal of his depression was good but before and after this he just didn't seem to have much to him, aside from A LOT of basketball exposition and chat about his height. I would have liked to understand a bit more about what made him tick and what drew the sisters to him.

I can understand why people might love this, and it was a great cleanser from the bleakness of my previous read!

Nothing makes me feel older than seeing the internet reaction to A Little Life shift from it being discussed as a masterpiece to being almost cancelled for its portrayal of its main character. After my Mum insisted that I read this, I decided to finally take the plunge, in case January wasn't depressing enough.

For anyone who somehow hasn't come across this novel, A Little Life in theory follows a group of four men from their time at college together through their adulthood. However as the novel progresses we zero in on Jude, who is source of mystery to his friends and whose traumatic past and present becomes the focal point of the novel.

I came away from A Little Life feeling confused. It is indisputable that Yanagihara is exceptionally talented at characterisation. The central friendship group in particular - Willem, JB and Malcolm feel incredibly real, as does the slightly rareified art scene they all exist in do. I also really liked Harold and Julia, and how they form a chosen family relationship with Jude. The detail and complexity that Yanighara built into the interactions of all the characters felt both raw and true.

However. And it is a big however. I found the exploration of Jude's trauma and his experience to be unremittingly dark. Whilst I don't buy the complaint that it is unrealistic - as unfortunately cycles of abuse are true and exist - I will say it felt overly heightened. I felt that Yanighara dwelled on descriptions that did not need to have that much time spent on them. Others have said this and I agree that the complete dearth of hope and optimism in this novel made it hard to read - and noting that Yanighara has since said that she actively wanted to write a protaganist that never gets better left me wondering what readers are supposed to take from this other than exhaustion. When the final removal of hope happened in this novel I came close to slamming it down.

I also found Jude a hard protagonist to invest in. He has access to an insane amount of resources, is apparently the most gifted man to walk the planet (can bake and sing exceptionally, in addition to being an exceptional and morally bad lawyer) and exceptionally attractive but seemingly won't take responsibility for trying to address his trauma until it is frankly too late. The novel standing by him, whilst treating others who had also felt loss (such as death of family members, addiction etc) as needing to just get it together felt confusing tonally to me.

I can totally understand why A Little Life caused such as stir when it was first released, but I hope for books in the future that can tackle both the light and the dark that make up human lives.

I started listening to Brotopia is weirdly prescient times. Whilst this book was written in 2018 which is basically 100 years in tech terms, the rise of the 'boys club' that Chang explores her has only gotten both worse and also even more powerful than they were in the pages of this book.

Brotopia explores how tech offered a golden opportunity to tear up the old fashioned rule book of corporate America only to end up entrenching the old rule book of harrassment and repeatedly hiring people who reminded the (male) cofounders of themselves. I will say there is not a lot of new new information in here, which may well be a result of this being written seven years ago. and much of this having been discussed many time since. Chang is a compelling writer and has had access to many of the key Silicon Valley players who often seem oblivious to the impact of their actions.

Not a perfect book, but definitely an interesting insight into the early days of tech.

Prophet Song is the 2023 winner of the Booker Prize and whilst an interesting read is by no means my favourite Booker-winner that I have read. It follows Eilish, a microbiologist and mother of four, living in a not-to-distance Ireland. She's just returning to work following the birth of her fourth child when her husband Larry, who works in education unions, is invited in for questioning by the police following an election of a new government. From there we sink further into a nationalist regime, Larry disappears and the country descends into civil war.

This is no doubt an interesting thought experiment, and there are moments that Lynch brings to the page which are really effective. The shifting in media avaliability, the moments of protest being hit by violence, the last quarter of the novel in particular as Eilish (finally) recognises the real desperation that her family are in have really stuck with me. However, I was left feeling slightly disconcerted by a narrative which 'imagines' events that are happening in countries now - and I'm not sure if this could have been more effective if Lynch had positioned this novel in one of those many places (this bought to mind The Beekeeper of Aleppo for example). I also found it strange that Ireland's history of occupation and violence was not mentioned in the pages of this novel, when I think it would still be in the memories of many of the characters in the novel.

As hinted at above, I found Eilish a slightly frustrating protagonist to be following, who seemed entirely oblivious to the reality of the world around her. Unlike the protaganist in Black Butterflies, who similarly remains in a war zone past the point of being able to flee, we don't get a sense of what keeps Eilish where she is - aside from her commitment to the men in her family. She is a scientist, a woman whose career is based on evidence, who seemingly ditches this the moment her husband leaves. The children are generally well-drawn, although I felt that Molly was poorly served by a narrative that focused on her brothers and sidelined her. I particularly liked Lynch's portrayal of Eilish's father, he felt an effective additional character to the narrative, and the reminder that multiple crisis can hit at once, as he appears to be struggling with the arrival of dementia.

As others have reflected, Lynch's writing veers from the impactful and effective to the deeply overwritten - I could have done with slightly fewer musings on darkness, and Eilish's children's faces - I think sometimes these descriptions undermined the strength of Lynch's narrative.

All in all, this is a fine novel - and if it's setting means more people pick this up than would pick up a refugee narrative than that is fine, but I'm surprised by it's Booker winning status.

My final listen of 2024 was Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister which I found to be totally engaging and fascinating. I really enjoyed Jung Chang's Wild Swans which I read back in 2017, which was a memoir of the women in her family living in China. This book takes a similar approach, exploring the 20th century in China via the lives of the fascinating Soong sisters.

Despite studying this period of history before, I somehow had never come across the Soong's - who were all deeply embedded in the changes in power within the country. One sister, Ching-ling marries Sun Yat-sen, the 'father' of modern China who took power following the introduction of a republic before finding Communism, one, May-ling, marries Chiang Kai-Shek, the pre-Mao leader of China. Finally, Ei-ling becomes one of the wealthiest women in China, maintaining influence over both political leaders.

I found this to be an engaging and very personal look at the three women - bought to life via their numerous letters and correspondence. I appreciated how Chang showed how these women were both independent thinkers in their own right, as well as being used by male leaders for their own ends. I would have liked Chang to interrogate their actions a little more - particularly Ei-ling who isn't as central to the narrative as the book progresses but has many fingers in pies which are slightly under explained.

The thing that got in the way of me enjoying this totally was the audiobook version I listened to on Spotify was narrated by a very posh lady, who seemed to pronounce every Chinese name/location as if she had literally never seen that word before. I would love for this to be given an audiobook that has the flow it deserves.

A slightly random inclusion for me, as I haven't read any middle grade fiction since I was about that age myself. However, one of my favourite TikTokkers is Meet Me in the Media Centre, and Swim Team is one of the libraries most checked out novels, so I had to give it a whirl!

This is a super cute read about a girl who moves with her Dad to a new state and school, and who is forced into swimming due to the full class schedules. She discovers new friends, skills and herself through participating. The book also sensitively tackles segregation and the lack of access many black people have had to community resources like swimming pools over the past decades.

Super cute - and reminded me how much I do enjoy graphic novels. 

At no point did I have a clue where this narrative was going and I mean that in the most complimentary way to Eliza Clark. This is a startling, dark novel following Irina - a photographer who produces sexually violent pictures of men that she scouts in the shops, bars, public transport and streets of Newcastle.

Irina as a protagonist is often darkly funny - there were moments of her narrative that made me snort with laughter - but mostly reprehensible. She's obsessive about her body and appearance, treats her best friend pretty terribly and loathes the men that she photographs. She is the ultimate unreliable narrator - often contradicting her thoughts and behaviours. There were moments were I did wish we had a bit more of a rationale for her behaviour - whilst there are hints at what may be motivating her I think really just allowing Irina to be unhinged gives Clark potentially more space to make points through her narrative.

Clark's writing is pacy and has a sense of general foreboding throughout. She so easily draws the multitude of characters and relationships within the novel which I found fascinating. Clark also definitely has points to make about gendered violence and sexual politics, and who gets to have what 'gaze' when it comes to gender. I did find some plot lines petered out in a way that I didn't always find satisfying, and I'm still trying to work out what I think about the ending.

Either way, I'm super excited to pick up Penance in 2025.