angelayoung's reviews
334 reviews

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

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adventurous dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Queenie is an eye-opener for white folk who don't know how young Black female lives are lived in London (Jamaicans in Brixton; Africans in Peckham) and particularly how Black women are often treated as sex objects by white men and their horribly casual racism and their absolutely overt racism. 

I thought there was just a little too much telling instead of showing (in the writing) especially in the early parts of the book, but Queenie's situation and her emotional courage and wavering determination are so compelling that I stopped noticing and gave myself to her story. The book is also very funny, especially in its depiction of Queenie's Jamaican grandparents and her loud aunt Maggie, and in the exchanges between her group of friends, especially between Queenie and Kyazike (Cheskay in case you wondering) and heart-warming in their support of their friend. In the end, I didn't want it to end.
The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

This is an old story and a brand new story: it uniquely combines ancient fable with life in the 1970s on a Caribbean island. Through the mermaid's story we discover ourselves: our cruelties; our kindnesses; our hatred of and fascination for change; our racism; our capacity for love and for hatred; our tolerance and our intolerance ... I began this novel wondering if Monique Roffey could make the story of a mermaid work in my 21st-century mind and heart, hoping she could. I finished it entirely convinced that she had. Her writing and her story are both lucid and mysterious, as clear and as fantastic as the mermaid herself.
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

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adventurous emotional hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Washington Black is a curious book. It's plot is both compelling but also, I found, curiously confusing. The narrative question it asks is: Why did (spoiler alert) the white man who befriended and taught a young Black boy (George Washington Black, known as Wash) eventually abandon him (in snowy wastes, far from the warm climate he knew)? I felt for and understood Wash's pain, and his search for the man who taught him and hurt him so much, but I didn't entirely understand the resolution. Which, I'm sure, means I've missed it, not that it isn't there ... .
Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

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challenging emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Mrs Death Misses Death is, you won't be surprised to hear, a meditation on death. It's by turns poignant, funny, poetic, thoughtful and thought-provoking, and frightening because it - inevitably - makes its readers, us, think about our own deaths. It's also a brave and wise book and when, through reading this book perhaps, we begin to accept the fact of our own deaths, we too become braver and wiser about both our lives and our deaths.

Mrs Death Misses Death doesn't really have a story (plot, if you will) of its own because it holds the potential for all human stories, all human fears, worries, madnesses, loves, joys and new beginnings. It holds - or provokes thought and feelings about - all that makes us human. And it's also funny.
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Shuggie Bain is beautifully written, as so many reviewers have said, and of course that beautiful writing contributed to Douglas Stuart's 2020 Booker Prize win. But is so unrelentingly bleak. I made myself finish it because it's a story that should be read, a story about life lived in poverty and bleak unhappiness, and about alcoholism that causes despair. It's also about the desperate hope that surfaces when, for a time, the drinking stops. But the dire emotional state of the children of the alcoholic is almost too poignant to bear (although I made myself read it because I knew I should know better how life is for children of alcoholics and people with little hope and no money). And there is a sort of redemption at the end. But it takes a long time to get there (literally and metaphorically, Shuggie Bain is a long novel) and this book certainly isn't one to escape into during lockdown.
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

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dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I was given Where the Crawdads Sing for Christmas by a perspicacious friend who knew I'd like it. And I did. It does that thing that I've - belatedly! - realised all good novels do: they pose a question at the beginning, or set a goal, which is answered or achieved. Or, if it isn't, something major is discovered along the way and the question / goal changes, or the character realises s/he needs to do something different. This is a whodunnit, really. But along the way our heroine discovers herself and what she's capable of and how she can be loved if she allows people close enough (which she finds very difficult for historic reasons). And how dangerous allowing people close can be (as she always knew) ... . A truly absorbing novel - which is jsut what we need in lockdown, isn't it?
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

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Did not finish book.
Perhaps it's lockdown (again). And so perhaps I need something to immerse me far more than Bel Canto did. Perhaps I'll go back to it. It's still by my bed ... .
Whites: On Race and Other Falsehoods by Otegha Uwagba

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challenging informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.0

Otegha Uwagba is Black. I am white. Uwagba's WHITES - an essay on racism, whiteness and the mental and emotional labour required of Black people to negotiate racism and whites - is a trenchant lesson for us whites on how it really is to be Black in the UK, and how we whites so casually and so carelessly fail to realise, let alone recognise, our own racism.  On page 43, Uwagba quotes Wesley Morris on 'the truest description of the Black experience when navigating white spaces': For people of colour, some aspect [s] of friendship with white people   [or as Uwagba writes, being around white people in general]  involves an awareness that you could be dropped through a trapdoor of racism at any moment, by a slip of the tongue, or at a campus party, or in a legislative campaign. But it's not always anticipated. She gives several examples of being dropped through that trapdoor and how it feels. And they're all awful.

The only thing we whites can do, if we're serious about allyship, is to become Race Traitors, defined by Noel Ignatiev (a white man) as: Those white people fully committed to the abolition of whiteness. ... Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity. In the same section Uwagba quotes from Barnor Hesse's The 8 White Identities, which she has 'found to be a useful framework for understanding how committed (or not) individual white people are to overthrowing whiteness'. What true allyship looks like, Uwagba believes, is described in the seventh and eighth white identities: (7) 'white traitor', defined by Hesse as the white person who 'actively refuses complicity; names what's going on; intention is to subvert white authority and tell the truth at whatever cost', and (8) the 'white abolitionist', who 'changes institutions; dismantling whiteness, and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself'.

Despite not being affiliated to or working for any organisation, I resolve to find ways to do this.
The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender

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dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

The Butterfly Lampshade is an extraordinary evocation of the workings of the mind and memory, and also of love, loss, haunting, and a few things which may or may not have happened but which Francie, the main character, believes did happen. The novel is, perhaps, summed up by three sentences on page 129: The butterfly I found in that water glass had to gain internal functions and an external structure, had to come out of an entirely different plane of existence to make itself, but somehow it did, and what I drank down with that glass of water had a body and legs and was real, had become real. It was an active psychosis. I swallowed a psychosis.
Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward

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challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

I loved most of Love and other Thought Experiments, but there were a couple of parts, towards the end, connected with the son's adult life, that left me a little puzzled and disconnected. So I stopped reading for a bit. But because the central love story is so beautiful and beautifully evoked, and because the thoughtful linking of philosophical ideas with plot is so intriguing, I picked it up again and finished it.