Review: Love in Colour – Bolu Babalola

★★★★★

This book. This book.

Love in Colour is a collection of short stories, which are based on myths from mostly African folklore but also some other cultures, about love. I don’t read romance-y type books, I generally loathe romance in any book (because I rarely see me) and it always invariably disappoints or makes me lose all interest. But this felt raw and real, and passionate and I loved it.

As with all short stories, there were a couple I enjoyed less, but for the most part these were all hits. Every story was so rich, fleshed out and vivid, no character sounded like another. Bolu Babalola is a gymnast of the written word, each story had it’s own tone which suited the nature of the story, if it was softer or sexier, if it was passionate or chaste. I want full novels of some of these stories, because what I had had me wanting more.

My favourite story was Nefertiti, and oh my god I need this novel. Underground mob boss, low key queer Nefertiti? I want this. I need this. It was one of the more edgy and plot (rather than romance) driven stories in the collection, and while there was romance in it there was so much more to it than that. It did feel a bit like an outlier, in and amongst quite a bit of fluff, but then it still fit in perfectly. I do think it was an experiment, but it worked. So very well.

If like me, romance – especially heterosexual romance – isn’t something you gravitate towards, isn’t a genre you enjoy, I would encourage you pick this up. This feels real, for the most part the couples in this book are believable. I loved the different layers; that every story had warmth, depth and characters that I was invested in. I loved this book. I loved it and I’m so glad I saw it in a top 10 books of 2020 on Instagram and actually read that review because I’m pretty certain I’d never have picked it up. Honestly, there’s nothing better than a book that just takes you by surprise like this.

Review: Her Body and Other Parties – Carmen Maria Machado

★★★★

Something I want to do in 2019 is get back in to Short Story Collections. I love a short story collection and they were woefully absent from my reading last year. So when I tasked my sister to pick a few books for me and she picked this up I was very excited. Not only because yes, the cover is that green, but because the content sounded right up my street.

The stories in this collection are fantastic. They’re fabulist, magical, feminist and queer. There’s not a lot to dislike if I’m honest. There was one story that didn’t really engage me, and it seems to be a common theme among readers of this collection, and it’s the one which is an episode-by-episode account of Law and Order. As someone who isn’t a Law and Order fan that was a miss for me. But the rest of this collection? Amazing.

There are so many unreliable, but interesting narrators in here with stories which just err on the side of the fantastic but are grounded in reality. We have a woman who is documenting her survival in a devastating epidemic by her sexual encounters, in another story we join a woman who works in a clothes shop in a world where women are fading out of existence. There’s one story, Mothers, which is so out there it’s hard to follow and very open to interpretation; it’s the best example in the whole collection of the unreliable narrator in that our protagonist is handed a baby by her female ex-lover and it’s hard to follow what’s real and what isn’t after that event.

All of the stories in this collection are raw, gritty and at times difficult to read. But it’s fantastic and genuinely one of the most well put together collections I’ve read in a long time. It reminded me why I love short stories so much. It was the perfect blend of reality and magical, it’s feminist, it’s queer, it’s sexy. It’s a lot of things. I wouldn’t say this is the easiest collection to read, not when there’s elements of abuse and sexual violence interspersed throughout but it’s definitely a great book and one I’d recommend to people in the future.

Review: Trickery – Roald Dahl

Rating – 3*

I was fortunate enough to be approached by Penguin to take part in a blog tour to celebrate Roald Dahl day on the 13th of September, in exchange for taking part I was sent four of Dahl’s short story collections to peruse and review. Today I’m going to discuss one of those in the shape of Trickery.

I’ve never read any of Dahl’s adult fiction before so this was a really new experience for me, and I’m happy to say that his writing translates really well to an adult audience. The bizarre and slightly dark nature of all of his children’s books is elevated to a new level, a much more mature level, and it really works.

The reason I picked this book up opposed to one of the other three I was sent is that I felt that a book around Trickery would have a more varied assortment of stories than something like War. And it was just what I was in the mood for, stories with good twists! As you’d expect with a theme of trickery linking all the stories the collection focuses on how we as humans use deceit, lies and manipulation to achieve our goals – but this book also focuses on the repercussions and fall out which shows that it doesn’t always get you what you think it has and that life has many twists and turns to surprise you yet!

I’m sure many of you reading this will agree with me when I say that the trouble with short story collections is that it’s highly unlikely that you will love every single story. I gave this collection 3 stars because I really enjoyed around half of the stories, some stood out to me more than others, and while none were bad there were just weaker stories sandwiched between stand outs.

My two favourites in this collection were The Visitor and Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat. Both really stood out to me. In The Visitor we follow Oswald, a man who has travelled extensively and finds himself stranded in the Egyptian outback and receives help from a wealthy local resident and his family. However, I do think my favourite among the stories was Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat in which we follow Mrs Bixby, a woman who is carrying out an affair and gets more than she bargained for when trying to pull the wool over her husbands eyes.

This was a solid collection, and I feel very fortunate to have been picked by Penguin to take part in this Blog Tour to celebrate Roald Dahl’s work! I’m definitely going to be picking up more of his short stories because the good stories in this collection were great and ones that will stick with me. Not only that, but I’m also really looking forward to reading what all these wonderful people have to say over the next 2 and a half weeks!

Review: Norse Mythology – Neil Gaiman

Rating – 2*

I love mythology. I’ve always had a keen interest, and it’s been something that I often come back to on occasion, in phases. My first love was Egyptian mythology, and then I moved on to Greek (and to a lesser part, Roman) but I have to admit I never really stumbled much upon Norse myth until I was older. So before going in to this book my knowledge of Norse Mythology was quite lacking, and in all honesty it’s still quite lacking on the other side.

Neil Gaiman can tell a good story, of that I’m certain. I’m just starting to wonder if I read his work in a completely different way to others. I’ve honestly never read a Gaiman book that I’ve loved and there are a number of reasons for that, and it always seems to come back to one key feature – he’s really, really bad at writing female characters. There are some incredible women in Norse mythology, and yet all they do in this book is stand to one side, flicking their golden hair and pouting. While I understand that most current understanding of Norse myth comes from MCU, there is more to it than Thor, Odin and Loki – yet this book didn’t seem to cover all that much of it. In fact, it was just one big ole sausage fest and as many of you dear readers may know, I don’t do sausage.

But this book confused me, at times it read like a children’s book but then there were moments which were certainly not for children. I found as the book went on it became all very monotone, even as an audiobook I found it flat and found myself getting more and more disconnected as it went on.

I recently read Stephen Fry’s retelling of Greek Myths and this is pretty meh in comparison. I can only imagine how incredible Stephen Fry’s Norse Myths would be based off of that.

So I gave this 2 stars, because there were moments of brilliance but they were few and far between for me unfortunately. And I think it’s fair to say I’m not going to be reading any more Gaiman because, honestly, every one of his books I’ve read I’ve been disappointed by.

 

Review: The Scent of Cinnamon – Charles Lambert

Rating – 3*

Firstly, it’s been a while since I wrote a review, so I’m more than a little rusty. Secondly, welcome to the first review in a series I’m going to be calling my Summer of Salt.

The Scent of Cinnamon is a short story collection published by Salt and is full to the brim with stories which completely boggled my mind. As with all short story collection there were some which I didn’t enjoy as much as others, but the collection as a whole is full of mysteries and things which made me think.

The titular story is one which on the surface didn’t seem all that deep, in fact it came across as a little meek and mild but come the end I was really engaged, I loved the direction it went in and genuinely didn’t see the end coming. This was a recurring theme with the whole collection – each story took it’s own path away from what I had cooked up in my head and I don’t think there was even one story in here which was predictable.

The collection spans time and genre, the only thing which really linked each of the stories together being the general writing style and I actually really enjoyed that. I enjoy a themed collection as much as the next person but sometimes it’s nice to have stories which really stand on their own.

My only criticism is that a lot of the stories end very abruptly, and as someone who likes all loose ends gathered up and neatly put in a bow that was really frustrating. I also found several of the stories haven’t really stuck with me, which isn’t great.

Overall this was a pretty solid collection, and if you enjoy very varied collections I’d definitely suggest this. There, I think, is something for everyone – maybe more for some than others. For me it was very middle of the road overall, but it was definitely worth a read!

Review: A Guide to Being Born – Ramona Ausubel

Rating – 2*

This is one of those books which has been sitting there, itching to be read, for a number of years. I think I bought this way, way back on a friends recommendation and have had such high hopes for it since that I just didn’t want to pick it up – it wasn’t quite the right time.

I think I may have gone in to this book with expectations far too high because, well, I didn’t enjoy it. Ausubel’s writing is beautiful, there’s no escaping that. How she uses language, her turns of phrase, her imagery and atmosphere is incredible but the actual stories as separate entities? Those I didn’t enjoy so much.

So many reviews of this collection say that they (as readers) were swept up in her worlds, and loved the creativity and whimsy of what she created. Said that stories in here were beautiful. For me, I didn’t get that. Some of the stories physically repulsed me – and I get that that was the intention, to blur those lines between reality and fiction, to have questionable ethics and plots to make you think. But, honestly, some of it for me went too far over the line for me to enjoy.

I so wanted to love this book, but in the end I carried on reading out of a sense of obligation. Not because I necessarily wanted to. I hoped – fruitlessly – that I would find that story in here, that one that made me forget all the faults and issues I had, the one that swept me up and made me love this collection as everyone else on my GoodReads friends list seems to. But it didn’t happen. The stories did get better, but not enough for me to recall them at any given moment – never mind a week after the event in a review! And the stories I do remember I don’t particularly wish I could, I wish I could erase them from my memory.

As I said, Ausubel is clearly a talented writer to evoke this emotion from me – because I don’t think I’d feel so passionately about a book being packed full of stories I disliked if I hated the writing. I’d have just thrown it to one side and forgotten about it. But, with this book, I didn’t feel I could do that. Only go in to this book with a strong stomach and preparation that it isn’t quite the ‘Cath Kidston’ of short story collections like many of the reviews make you believe.

Review: Kissing the Witch – Emma Donoghue

Rating – 4*

What can I say about this collection other than I absolutely loved it? Some background first, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Emma Donoghue in that I either really love, or really dislike, her books. Room was amazing, so was one of her historical novels, then came along Frog Music which is one of the few books I have DNF’d over the years. This was definitely a hit, in spite of my trepidation going in to it.

Essentially this is a collection of fairy tale retellings – people like Kirsty Logan have cited it as a source of inspiration for their work. High praise like that really puts a book on a pedestal, but on reading it I fully understand why it is so highly regarded. All of the stories in this book, or rather snippets in to the characters lives, twist the well known version of the story in to feminist, slightly queer retellings which still (somehow) keep the character of the original. How Donoghue worked all of the fairy tales in to the same world, and had them seamlessly flow in to each other was genius and it made the collection flow absolutely perfectly.

Each tale is the story of a female character before they became the trope in the original fairy tale – their story before they were witches, stepmothers, crones or spinsters; their stories of being girls, sisters and daughters. Each story flows in to the next by the protagonist simply asking who they were, and we go through generations of women, and ending with the origin of the kiss-seeking witch.

Frankly, this collection is genius – and having read a lot of works which have been influenced by it, I can now see the influence it has had on some of my favourite authors (particularly Kirsty Logan’s A Portable Shelter). It is definitely up there with my favourite short story collections, and one I will be reading again in the future for certain.

I listened to this as an audiobook and can’t recommend it highly enough – it was narrated beautifully and while it was the same narrator for each story, every character had their own voice, it wasn’t flat or monotone like a lot of short story collections, or multiple personality audiobooks suffer with!

Review: Mythos – Stephen Fry

Rating – 5*

When I saw this book on Audible I knew I had to get it – it’s one of the few audiobooks I’ve actually preordered this year. My thoughts were it is Greek mythology and Stephen Fry; sounds like a perfect combination. I wasn’t far wrong.

Greek Myths have an awful habit of being very dull reads – this however was not dull. The familiar tales were told in a much more modern, approachable way than the starchy collections I’ve read in the past. What I love most about this collection is how seamlessly he wove modern culture, and what we have obtained thanks to classical myth, in with the story – literature and music are referenced in abundance, but then there is also origins of elements and compounds in science which I had absolutely zero idea about prior to reading this! It’s both fiction and non fiction simultaneously because, actually, I feel I learnt a lot about what shaped humans (given that modern civilisation has a lot to owe to the ancient Greeks!)

The collection is told in a round-about chronological way, starting with the creation myth of Chaos, on to the Titans and the Olympians. The way the stories are put across is like a multi-generational saga, it makes it so much more modern than other collections I’ve read which are essentially the same stories. We get those familiar stories of Pandora and her box (or vase, as it was a mistranslation), Midas, Echo and Narcissus… so many of the stories which I adored as a child (and on reading this, love again).

Not only is it more modern, it’s so much more fun and I can’t help but think that’s entirely down to Stephen Fry as an author putting a bit off lightness in all the characters and having a bit of fun – and I loved it. I listened to this in the space of 2 evenings and it was a joy to listen to as he narrates it himself, making it twice as much fun as it would have been otherwise. I can only hope that he does more like this because, damn, it was so much fun!

I’d highly recommend this to anyone who likes Stephen Fry, classical myth, audiobooks, or is generally curious because actually while this is fiction I feel I learnt a lot of (useless) information from it which I can now use to impress my friends!

Review: In A Glass Darkly – J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Rating – 3*

Firstly I will apologise as reviewing a book read over a month ago is quite a task for someone with memory problems! This is probably going to be quite brief because of it, but I think the fact I can’t remember much of it says everything about the content – it wasn’t overly memorable.

I can’t lie, I picked this collection up purely for Carmilla (lesbian vampires people. Lesbian vampires.) as I thought for the price it was a better deal – and while the stories in this collection were interesting, I can’t say they were entirely my cup of tea. In a way, I wish I wasn’t such a bargain hunter and just read Carmilla as a standalone because it was by far the stand out of the collection.

I can understand why the stories in here were ground breaking – they predate the more well known classic ‘horror’ novels like Dracula by over 20 years, which is frankly quite impressive. And in a time before electricity I can imagine that all of the stories in this collection were pretty terrifying, now they were more humorous than scary.

What I did enjoy is that all the stories were connected in that they were all found in the papers of Dr Martin Hesselius – a character who was a sort of hybrid between Fox Mulder and Dana Scully in the 19th Century – a strong belief in the occult but also in possession of a very level head and medical expertise. I found the voice quite an easy one to follow, while there were the typical, over wordy elements of 19th century literature I was able to plod along quite happily and read each story in one sitting without feeling tired (which is often the case with Victorian novels!)

On the whole though, this was a 3* read. I loved the first story – Green Tea – about a reverend and a demon monkey, and I loved Carmilla. Those two aside it was all very meh and forgettable – to the point where a month on they’re the only two stories I can remember in the collection.

If you like Gothic literature, or have an interest in lesbian vampires or demon monkeys, I’d definitely give this collection of short stories/novellas a go!

Review: Fly Away Home – Marina Warner

Rating – 3*

After reading what I can only describe as an incredible book published by Salt earlier this month, I decided it was high time I started making headway on the collection of books I have published by them sitting on my shelves. It was this one which caught my attention.

Fly Away Home is a short story collection containing 20 stories. I had very few doubts going in to this collection, frankly I didn’t even know what it was about, I saw it in a local bookshop a few months ago, saw Salt’s logo on the side and picked it up. As discussed previously, I love them as a publisher and whenever I see a book when I’m out, I do have a tendency to pick it up!

Unfortunately, this collection wasn’t for me. It wasn’t that it was bad, it was just that there were only a few stand out stories in the 20 which I really enjoyed, everything else just didn’t hit all the right buttons for me. I love stories which tread the fine line between fantasy and reality. As a whole, the collection had this but I felt that the balance of the two was slightly off. There were so many stories in here that I wanted to love but just lacked something – it’s hard to put my hand on what it was because I loved so many of the ideas, it was just the execution of them which lacked.

Warner’s writing is engaging, it’s interesting and how she interprets myth and fairytale is really something I enjoyed. I just wish there had been more exploration in some stories (Mélusine: A Mermaid Tale for example is one I wish could have had more context and more exploration because I wanted to love that one so, so much) and explored less in others.

It’s by no means a bad collection, I did give each story a rating which, on average, was a 3*. One of my favourites was one of the earlier stories A Chatelaine in the Making which for me had the best balance of fantasy and realism in the collection; it was just the right amount of fantasy to make it read like a fairy tale, but enough realism there to make it dark and twisty.

It isn’t my favourite short story collection, but as with all books (especially short story collections I find) there is a large matter of subjectivity. If we all loved the same thing, then the world would be a boring place! If this book sounds like something you might be interested in do pick it up because I appear to be in a minority – at least according to goodreads!