Book Club 1 Reviews 2019
Jan-Feb: The Lightkeepers Daughters by Jean E Penziwol
This was a book we enjoyed, with most of the group awarding it 4 out of 5 marks.
(Quote from nyjournalobooks.com, reviewed by D R Meredith).
Jean E. Pendziwol’s debut adult novel is a compelling read, rich in historical detail and descriptive narrative. An exploration of the life of a lightkeeper and his family living on an isolated island in Lake Superior, and the secret that twists and eventually blights the close-knit relationships between family members. Poignant and in many ways sad, The Lightkeeper’s Daughters slowly reveals a story of love, commitment, and self-sacrifice that underlies the bond between twin sisters, Elizabeth and Emily.
Elizabeth Livingstone spends her days in a care home on the edge of Lake Superior thinking of the past, remembering Porphyry Island and the lighthouse and her father the lightkeeper. .
Also at the care home is Morgan, an orphan and foster child brought in after her grandfather’s death. Possessing only her grandfather’s violin and four unframed watercolors, Morgan is nearly a juvenile delinquent.
Morgan and Elizabeth meet and the angry teenager and the nearly blind elderly woman form an unlikely bond. Morgan is mesmerized by three paintings owned by Elizabeth. Morgan recognizes the style as identical to the watercolors owned by her grandfather.
But there are other questions that are answered. The night Elizabeth hears Morgan play the violin, and sees the sketches hidden in the violin case, sketches drawn by Emily in 1943, Elizabeth knows that her story, her past, is also Morgan’s past.
Pendziwol’s descriptive narrative creates a detailed mental image of Porphryr Island without losing her readers in overwrought prose, while the unexpected twist at the end is one that any mystery writer would envy.
The Lightkeeper’s Daughters is a story of commitment, identity, and familial loyalty that will leave one in tears. Five out of five stars.(unquote).
Feb-Mar: Atonement by Ian McEwan
We enjoyed this book, with one vote of 3 out of 5 and everyone else rating it even higher. The following comments are from a Guardian review.(quote).
Atonement does not feel, at first, like a book by McEwan. The opening is almost perversely ungripping. Instead of the expected sharpness of focus, the first 70 or so pages are a lengthy summary of shifting impressions. The book later contains a critique of its own early pages - or at least of the draft from which they derive.
Cecilia, the eldest daughter of the family in whose house we are imaginatively lodged, was at Cambridge with Robbie, whose education was funded by Cecilia's father. They become aware, on this sultry day, of some kind of current - animosity? irreconcilable attraction? - passing between them. Robbie tries to articulate this in a letter and sends the letter to Cecilia via her adolescent sister, Briony, who opens and reads it.
The consequences of the go-between blundering in like this are liberating and incriminating in unequal measure.
In the second section of the novel, the pastel haze of the first part gives way to an acrid, graphic account of Robbie's later experiences in the British rout at Dunkirk. In the atrocious context of battle, Briony's apparently motiveless crime is rendered almost insignificant.
Part three shifts back to London, where Briony is training as a nurse, struggling to cope with the influx of casualties from Dunkirk. McEwan's command of visceral shock is here anchored in a historical setting thoroughly authenticated by his archival imagination.
It is a tribute to the scope, ambition and complexity of Atonement that it is difficult to give an adequate sense of what is going on in the novel without preempting - and thereby diminishing - the reader's experience of it.(unquote).
Mar-Apr: The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd
As a group, we enjoyed this book, with most members awarding it 4 out of 5 or more.
The Guardian review was a follows;quote.
The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd: her latest novel gives visceral voice to the conflicts surrounding slavery, race and gender
The struggle of 19th-century abolitionist and women's rights pioneer Sarah Grimké is at the heart of Sue Monk Kidd's powerful new historical novel. Set – like her bestselling debut, The Secret Life of Bees – in the American deep south, where she grew up, The Invention of Wings unflinchingly depicts the brutality of slavery in vivid and meticulous detail, placing it in the tradition of novels such as Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison and first-person accounts such as Solomon Northup's 12 Years a Slave (now an Oscar-tipped film).
This is a world in which "owning people was as natural as breathing" and on her 11th birthday Sarah, the daughter of a wealthy family, is given 10-year old slave-girl Handful as a gift, wrapped in lavender ribbons. But for Sarah, it feels far from "natural" and she rails against the notion of slavery, teaching Handful to read and promising one day to free her – an eventuality that drives the plot as the years progress from 1803 to 1838. By alternating chapters between the first-person voices of Sarah and Handful, we are plunged deep into both perspectives; they share a visceral yearning and "torrential aches" for racial and gender equality.
Everyday rebellions against injustice pattern the plot. "You do your rebellions anyway you can," observes Handful when her mother is punished for stealing bright green cloth from her owner, in a narrative threaded with an intricate textile motif. "I have knots in my years that I can't undo," laments Handful, but, stitch by stitch, a more hopeful future is woven.
In a world beset by modern-day slavery, this is a resonant, illuminating novel. It is a story about searching for a voice to express inexpressible pain. Handful's "slave tongue" dialect is filled with hurt, longing and defiance, while Sarah, who struggles with speech, "pulled words up from her throat like she was raising water from a well". It's when they find voices to articulate the pain of being silenced that they pave their path to freedom.unquote.
Apr-May: The Muse, by Jessie Burton
The Muse was enjoyed by all of the group, with only one mark of less than 4 out of 5. Comments below are from the Guardian review.Quote.
In The Muse Burton has once again done the hard yards of research to reimagine not one but two distinct eras of the 20th century, and fused them to an intricate story of imposture. This is not a writer who can be faulted for ambition.
In the summer of 1967 a young woman named Odelle Bastien applies for a job at the Skelton Institute, a discreetly upmarket gallery in St James’s. Odelle, having arrived in London from Trinidad five years earlier, has put her dreams of being a writer on hold.
At her friend Cynth’s wedding reception, Odelle meets Lawrie, who has recently inherited a painting of a lion he thinks might be worth something. At the Skelton they’re very interested.
The mystery of the painting’s provenance is by degrees unveiled in the novel’s other timeframe, southern Spain in 1936.
Burton, juggling the two narratives, sets off chimes and resonances in her double portrait of hidden creativity. Slowly, themes of possession and identity begin to coalesce.
Burton constructs the dual plotline with painstaking craft, and has a good ear for the ambient interruptions of nature: “the cicadas began to build their rasping wall of sound”; “Bees drowsing on the fat flower heads, farmers’ voices calling, birdsong arpeggios spritzing from the trees”.
If there seems a fiercer conviction in the Spanish panel of the story, it may be because Burton is more engaged by the processes of painting, and by the virtuosity of its effects.
The bibliography she appends at the close indicates her immersion in the art history of the interwar years. She has also done her homework on the Spanish civil war.
The Muse is strong on the emotional and sensual, less so on the figurative depiction of interior states. It is a severely competent novel. The craftsmanship is solid, the sincerity of feeling is sustained to the end.Unquote.
May-Jun: The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas
This was a book that surprised the group - having found it difficult to enjoy initially, most of us valued it, rating it 3 or 4 out of 5. Comments below are from the Guardian.Quote.
“Girls wear their hair coloured, curled, laid, and slayed. Got me feeling basic as hell with my ponytail. Guys in their freshest kicks and sagging pants grind so close to girls they just about need condoms ...” Then gunshots shatter the music. Fleeing from the party, 16-year-old Starr is led to apparent safety by her friend Khalil. Shortly after, their car is pulled over by a police officer. What happens next crystalises the Black Lives Matter movement and indeed, the whole debate about race in America. The unarmed Khalil is murdered.
When she was 12, Starr’s parents instructed her on sex education – and on what to do if stopped by the police. “Keep your hands visible,” her father advised. “Don’t make any sudden moves.” It’s unnerving to read that part of the toolkit for raising a black child in America.
What makes this novel so compelling is the way Starr negotiates the relatively safe world of school, where she assimilates despite the soft racism of one or two so-called friends, and how she navigates the dangers of her own neighbourhood.
The first-person narrative is simply beautiful to read, and I felt I was observing the story unfold in 3D as the characters grew flesh and bones inside my mind. The Hate U Give is an outstanding debut novel and says more about the contemporary black experience in America than any book I have read for years.Unquote.
Jun-Jul: White Teeth, by Zadie Smith
(Guardian Review)
Zadie Smith appears to be keeping her feet on the ground - and in earthy Willesden too - but heaven knows how. Her debut novel, White Teeth (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99) has received an astonishing chorus of praise. Smith, a 24-year-old just out of Cambridge, had been given a £250,000 advance and hailed as "the new Salman Rushdie" by her publisher. "For once", said the usually testy Hugo Barnacle in the Sunday Times, "here is a Big New Literary Find that hasn't been oversold."
That was echoed everywhere. "Hamish Hamilton's publicists have made much of the fact that Smith is herself part of this entrepreneurial, multicultural Britain - she is young, she is half-Jamaican and she wrote the novel in quiet moments while revising for finals at Cambridge," wrote Melissa Denes in the Daily Telegraph. "But it would not matter if she were a he, white and the wrong side of 40: Smith can write.
It wasn't easy for critics to explain what this dizzying book was actually about. Detailing plotlines is the bane of fiction reviewing; boiled down to 300 words, plots sound confusing or ludicrous or, more often, both. Phillips had a lengthy go, but it defeated him.
Maya Jaggi's more lateral approach in the Guardian certainly made the book sound engaging: "Its characters embrace Jehovah's Witnesses, halal butchers, eugenicists, animal-rights activists and a group of Muslim militants who labour under the unfortunate acronym KEVIN." I'd buy that.
There was one less than ecstatic review, in the literary magazine Butterfly. "This kind of precocity in so young a writer has one half of the audience standing to applaud and the other half wishing, as with child performers of the past (Shirley Temple, Bonnie Langford et al), she would just stay still and shut up. White Teeth is the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10-year-old." The review, according to Sam Wallace in the Daily Telegraph, was written by Smith herself.
Jul-Aug: How To Be Both, by Ali Smith
This book was a disappointment to the group. Despite the good reviews and the glowing review (below) in the Guardian, our high mark was 3 out of 5.
QUOTE
How to Be Both is not a multi-choice narrative, but the textual order depends on an element of chance. The book has two interconnected stories. There is a teenage girl called George whose mother has just died and who is left struggling to make sense of her death. And then there is an Italian renaissance artist, Francesco del Cossa, a real-life figure responsible for a series of striking frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy.
At its heart, How to Be Both is an eloquent challenge to the binary notions governing our existence. Why, Smith seems to ask, should we expect a book to run from A to B, by way of a recognisable plot and subplot, peopled by characters who are easily understood to be one thing or another?
This duality is at the core of the book: the dead coexist with the living and their stories intertwine, sometimes in ways that make no sense other than the poetic. But in this textual hall of mirrors, nothing is certain.
It's a fascinating trick to play. Whether Smith manages to pull it off depends on what kind of reader you are. But there is no doubt that Smith is dazzling in her daring. The sheer inventive power of her new novel pulls you through, gasping, to the final page.
UNQUOTE
Aug-Sep: Autumn by Ali Smith
This did not get an enthusiastic response from our members tho' half the group did comment that it was better than the previous Ali Smith book How to be Both. Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984,forms an unlikely friendship with Daniel, which started when she was a child.
The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-lifetime summer. “All across the country,” she writes of the Brexit referendum, “All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won… All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder. All across the country, people felt history meant nothing.”
Pauline Boty, the Profumo affair and the eternal values of art also contribute to this unusual novel, which many of our group thought would benefit from a second read, when they were up to it!!
We gave an average score of 2.9. Goodreads gave it 3.7 from over 39000 ratings.
Sep-Oct: From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan
This book consisted of three different stories with a brief fourth book joining them all up. The group who came thought there could have been more of Farouk, the refugee in the first book, which highlighted the emotions and pain of being a refugee and having to make many life-changing decisions. The second and third stories were about two inadequate men, Lampy and another, with a lot of bad language, which may have been how he spoke but wasn't pleasant to read. It was somewhat unclear in the end who was who as the author used pronouns a lot without making it clear which person was which. Quote from one member 'I did not enjoy the novel very much. It was more three short stories, loosely linked at the end. The only one I found interesting was the first on Farouk. Lampy’s story was just a lot of swearing and John’s rambled on about his life in great long sentences which I found rather tedious.'
The average score was 3.3 from 7 people. Goodreads gave it 3.8 from 3319 votes.
Oct-Nov: Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine by Gail Honeyman
This book was thorougly enjoyed by the majority of members, who gave it an average of 4.5 from 8 people, the highest score of the year. It is full of humour with plenty of twists in the story. Goodreads gave it an average of 4.5
Nov-Dec: Stoner by John Williams
There was a lot of discussion on this book, which portrayed the life of an 'ordinary' man who started as a farm labourer and went to uni to find better farming methods, and became entranced with literature. His marriage and teaching career and finally death, are all beautifully written. We gave it an average of 3.7.