amyvl93's reviews
902 reviews

Behind Closed Doors: Why We Break Up Families – and How to Mend Them by Polly Curtis

Go to review page

challenging informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

I'm always keen to read books about the areas that I work in, and I find that children's social care is an area that we just don't talk enough about as a country, so a book written by a national journalist about the system was a must-read for me.

Curtis dips into the system in a way that I think is accessible to those who haven't worked within this space before - covering everything from social work decision making to the legal system that wraps around it. She speaks to both families impacted by these decisions, social workers who make them, solicitors & judges within the family courts and those working for other partners - to understand how our system (doesn't) work and the impact it has on people.

One of the things that really stood out for me as a blind spot that Curtis highlights is the way the system places significant burdens on women and that fathers of children are entirely absent - and are seen as threats, even when they may be able to provide a child stability. I was also interested by the highlighting of the differences in experiences between those who are middle class and those who are working class - with one example of a woman being able to mobilise what seemed to be her entire community to prove that she was a competent mother, in a way that may be inaccessible for other parents.

As others have said there's not a lot of solutions in here - whilst Camden is highlighted as an area of good practice a number of times, there didn't seem to be a lot of other examples of good practice highlighted (which does exist outside of the capital too!). However, as an overview of our current system, I'd really recommend this.
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

Go to review page

emotional inspiring medium-paced

2.5

This was a bit of mixed bag for me. 

<i>The Salt Path</i> is a memoir that follows Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth, who upon losing their home after a poor investment decision and finding out Moth has been diagnosed with a degenerative disease, decide to set out on the South West Coast Path, a 500+ mile walk from Minehead to Poole.

I found that Winn's writing was actually quite compelling in developing a sense of place through the South West, both in the towns, small villages and general nature spots that her and Moth walk through. Like <i>Wild</i>, Winn also does a good job of the repetitive nature of walking and the various aches and pains that come with it.

The writing, and Winn's narrative, becomes less clear when she tries to make political points about homelessness - in part because she does still seem keen to separate her and Moth from 'bad' homeless people, and is generally always horrified when people compare them to 'tramps' or others. Despite Winn's writing about place being great, when it comes to talking about others they encounter whilst walking, almost all their encounters ring incredibly false. Of course, they could indeed be word for word correct, but every time they met someone I was a bit like...'oh no' - and don't get me started on a man who carries a copy of Beowulf everywhere not knowing who Simon Armitage...I was also a bit uncomfortable with the amount of anti-medicine narrative that creeps into the book too.

As a book about nature this is great, as a memoir less so.
Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

Go to review page

adventurous emotional funny medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

A nice surprise to start my Women's Prize reading early! I was really excited to read Stone Blind as I always tend to enjoy a Greek mythology retelling, despite not knowing that much about the original stories.

One critique of Stone Blind that I do agree with is that, despite its subheading, Medusa is very much a secondary character in this novel. We spend more time with the various Gods of Mount Olympus and Perseus than we probably do with her. This is a shame, as the attention that Haynes places in her writing of her characters is really excellent and it would have been great to spend more time with Medusa herself.

Despite this, this is a compelling re-telling of various myths, including the birth and rise of Athene, the rescue of Andromeda and, of course, Perseus and the Gorgon. There's a layer of humour that Haynes weaves throughout her retellings, as well as featuring really moving writing at times - particularly in Zeus' rape of Metis and in Athene's punishment of Medusa.

This is an enjoyable read - I did find the numerous perspectives did get a little too much at times and, as I mentioned, it would have been nice to have spent more time with the titular character of this novel but it was a fun time, and I love the cover.
The Loving Spirit by Daphne du Maurier

Go to review page

dark emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

I adore so many of Daphne du Maurier's novels, and so have a bit of a solo challenge to read her entire backlist. The Loving Spirit is her debut novel, published when she was just 24, and covers many of the themes and tropes that will be seen throughout her books moving forward, just slightly less successfully.

The novel opens following Janet Coombe, living in coastal Cornwall, gripped by a desire to explore and run wild in nature and the sea - but her gender forces her to choose marriage and family, and she settles into a peaceful existence, until the birth of her son Joseph who is her mirror and equally enamoured with the sea, not the shore. We go on to follow his son Christopher seeking fortune in London, and finally Christopher's daughter Jennifer, as she seeks to understand her family history.

The title comes from an Emily Bronte poem, and the spirit of Emily's novel Wuthering Heights is clearly felt here, with tangled family relationships and obsessions echoing through the ages. This is most clearly, and uncomfortably, seen in the relationship between Janet and Joseph. I would have enjoyed this a whole lot more, if I didn't have to read pages and pages of a relationship between a mother and a son which read far too like a relationship between two romantic leads - including an emotional reunion involving climbing through a window after being away. I found the novel really improved once we moved away from this relationship, and into the other generations, Joseph goes a bit Heathcliff-lite in later life, and his relationships with women (aside from his mother) are particularly uncomfortable to read.

On the plus side, Du Maurier's evocation of place is brilliant - Plyn's geography and community feels vivid and real, and when the action moves to London in the 1900s it is also evocatively drawn, and there are times when Christopher's boarding house feels like a comedy of manners. There is also great movement through the decades, and through the changing context and landscape of sailing and trade that was providing a community its lifeblood.

Lots of potential here, but one that I think is worth it for Du Maurier completists rather than on its own merit.
The Dinner Guest by B P Walter

Go to review page

dark tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

The Dinner Guest is a murder mystery about all the worst people you could ever meet.

Matthew is murdered, Rachel's confessed to the murder, and Charlie and Titus are shell-shocked. Case closed. Right? Wrong, we have 400 pages of before and after the murder narrative between Rachel and Charlie to tell us what actually happened that evening.

Charlie is overprivileged to the hilt, he runs an instagram influencer account (the novel includes some very detailed descriptions of photo filtering) and is the son of wealthy West London parents, one of whom is a political consultant who is famed for getting wealthy men off criminal charges. Rachel is a wide-eyed girl from Yorkshire, who quit her job as an assistant in a gardening centre to move to London for...mysterious reasons. Titus is the improbably named adopted son of Matthew and Charlie, who I spent most of the novel feeling bad for.

Walton writes a pacey read, but the characters have pretty minimal development and I often felt frustration at the chopping and changing of timelines and perspectives. There's also some odd stuff in here (the way Titus talks about sex and women goes oddly unchallenged, apparently bisexual people don't exist) that got in the way of me really being able to enjoy the novel
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

Go to review page

challenging dark medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I don't follow the Booker Prize as closely as my personal favourite the Women's Prize, but I am so glad it put Seven Moons on my radar as I really, really enjoyed it.

Seven Moons puts the reader into 1980s war-torn Sri Lanka, where you are really in the head of Maali Almeida (the novel is written in the second person), a war photographer, who has a week to work out who murdered him and to try and get his friends to a set of photographs he thinks should should change the course of the civil war.

In style, to some extent this novel reminded me of another Booker winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings, another novel that dealt with violent contexts in a frank but readable way. Karunatilaka doesn't shy away from the violence that walks the streets of Colombo and the wider country, and the desperation that many living in a war zone were experiencing - in direct comparison to the corruption at the heart of the system propped up by actors local and foreign.

Almeida is not the most likeable character to spend time with - he's ambivalent about the future, cheats on his partner with men he doesn't necessarily treat well and is unconcerned about the morality of the people he works with. However, he's also a compelling narrator, and the characters that surrounded him both living and in the afterlife are also well drawn - with plenty of shades of grey. The political figures are so well drawn I confidentally Googled some of them afterwards, only to discover they did not in fact exist

There were times when the pacing became a little slow, and I did find the ultimate reveal a tad underwhelming (although that may well have been the point) - but I did really like this, and would watch the HELL out of a mini-series based on this.
Bunny by Mona Awad

Go to review page

challenging dark medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Putting down Bunny felt like coming out of a fever dream, where I had no clue what anything I just read actually meant.

Bunny follows Samantha Mackey, who is doing her postgrad at a super elite arts college where she feels like a total outsider, especially compared to the 'Bunnies' who are her classmates in her class, who behave like an apparently doll-like cloyingly sweet mass, and so spends her time exchanging barbs with her one friend Ava. When the Bunnies invite her to hang out, Samantha is thrown into something truly strange.

Mona Award's writing style is often excellent - there are sharp barbs about liberal arts colleges, and about what privilege looks like even when you refuse to accept it, and she really amps up the fever-y writing as Samantha falls in with the Bunnies, including the narrative voice becoming more of a collective. I would have probably given up on this much earlier had the writing not been as good.

My main issue with the novel is that the narrative just gets a bit lost - the first darker instances are really evocatively written, and I actually enjoyed the darkness that Bunny embraces. However, it feels like it doesn't seem to know whether it is fully embracing the fantasy/horror of it all. To me, if a book leaves you feeling like you need to research the points it was making, it probably didn't make them well enough.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Go to review page

emotional inspiring lighthearted medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

Lessons in Chemistry is another much-hyped book of last year, which whilst an enjoyable read didn't quite hit the heights I had hoped for.

It's the 1960s, and Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist who isn't taken seriously in the male-dominated world of science. Her encounter with fellow brilliant chemist Calvin Evans changes both of their lives; and years later, Zott finds herself again fighting to be taken seriously as the host of an afternoon cooking show, now unmarried with a young daughter.

Garmus does a great job at building the back stories for both Elizabeth and Calvin, which give you as a reader a clear understanding of why they've ended up in the corner of California they now find themselves in, and what may contribute to their slightly difficult to like personalities. She is also pretty unflinching in her portrayal of sexism in this novel; from assault to stolen research to fighting to wear trousers, it may feel overwraught to a modern reader but is unfortunately accurate to the life that many women lived during the period.

However, I did find the book's tone seemed to dive between upfront confrontation of gender roles, to whimsical passages about dogs understanding Proust, which felt a little heavy handed. Likewise, Mad, Elizabeth's daughter, is often a compelling character but is given a slightly strange ability to almost read minds. As a character, Zott also seem bizarrely uninterested in interrogating the world she lived in; she knows that the traditional split of roles is wrong but doesn't seem to consider how or why they are there - likewise, bar one sentence it's strange to read a book set in the US in the 1960s with a reasonably switched on main character and have no conversation about race at all (it is interesting to me that the TV adaptation has cast two black actors in two supporting characters). I also found the ending a little too neat and tidy for my liking.

Overall, I do find Garmus pretty inspiring in releasing her debut novel in her 60s, and this is a fun read with a bit more substance - I'll be interested to see how it translates to the silver screen.

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

Go to review page

dark emotional reflective fast-paced

5.0

This memoir was everywhere last year, and after listening to a couple of interviews with McCurdy, I finally bit the bullet and picked up a copy. And I am so, so glad I did.

McCurdy is an excellent writer - this book really packs a punch and shows real narrative maturity as Jennette moves from reflecting on her childhood into her early 20s. This is a memoir that deals with just about every trigger warning you can imagine, but it never feels gratuitous, it just feels real. This is supported by the fact that McCurdy doesn't let herself off the hook for her less gracious moments or thoughts and feelings about other people - she's unflinchingly honest here.

Whilst there are anecdotes about the making of the Nickelodeon shows that propelled her to child TV stardom, these are less interesting than the way the entertainment machine experts its young stars to be both child and adult, and the way that they are (or, hopefully, were) manipulated into staying quiet about the darker, behind the scenes moments. The impact of this strangely halted growth are seen in particular within the romantic relationships that McCurdy writes about here.

The core of this memoir, as the title suggests, is McCurdy's incredibly difficult relationship with her Mum. It is her Mum who forces her into acting, who enrols her in numerous dance classes a week after failing one audition, who introduces her daughter to extreme dieting and refuses to have her children really experience growing up and away from her. She's an incredibly difficult character to read about, and McCurdy does a great job of avoiding villainising her whilst simultaneously sharing just how troubling her behaviour really was.

I hope Jennette can live a life that truly makes her happy now - and I really look forward to her stretching her writing muscles more.




Expand filter menu Content Warnings
Assembly by Natasha Brown

Go to review page

challenging reflective 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

This is a tricky one as Natasha Brown is definitely a voice I'm keen to hear more from, but this specific piece wasn't as satisfying as I wanted it to be.

According to the blurb, Assembly follows an unnamed narrator, a young black woman who works in finance as she goes to visit her white boyfriend's incredibly wealthy family for his parent's anniversary weekend at their country home. In reality, it's more 100-pages of being inside the narrator's head, as she puzzles over her place in the office, in her relationships and in England.

For the first half of the book, I felt like this was going to be an instant favourite- Brown's writing at times reminded me a lot of Ali Smith in the way references to other texts and cultural points are made - but I did find it meandered a little more in the second half. Whilst many of Brown's points about the non-white experience in England are incredibly well described, there are moments when it feels the narrative voice is stripped away which takes you out of the character and feels a little like you're reading a non-fiction piece instead. I'll also say I felt the narrator, and perhaps Brown by extension, is a little overly dismissive of the role that class plays in society - it felt like the one misstep in the book.

Despite a somewhat confusing 'plot' - Brown is a writer I'm definitely keen to hear more from.