angelayoung's reviews
323 reviews

Dominoes by Phoebe McIntosh

dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Dominoes had me in tears in the last fifty or so pages - not because Phoebe McIntosh's writing forced my tears, but because her writing's honesty about and through her characters is so very poignant. The novel is brave and thoughtful and the characters are so alive and (sometimes) funny and because McIntosh doesn't make the final (non-romantic) reconciliation an absolute reconciliation, but more the possible beginnings of one, the characters - especially those two - live on after the novel is finished.

Dominoes is also starkly truthful about the UK government's appalling treatment of the Windrush generation and their right to live and work in the UK and how those rights were randomly taken away from some of that generation. And it's starkly truthful about enslaved people and the slave-holders and how that terrible inhumane time still resonates today, including through the compensation that was paid to the slave-holders and inherited by their descendants, and was never paid - as it should have been - to the enslaved and so inherited by their descendants.

And it's about how to be your best self and how to forgive and how to fight for the life you want for others and for yourself. It's glorious and moving and deserves all the prizes.

The Water All Around Us by Lynn Michell

dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

 the water all around us sings with the beauty and poignancy of a lost whale's song 

 

I read this beautiful story in a weekend. The prose sings, it captivated me and I couldn't put it down. The story is full of hope and wisdom and sorrow. Fenn, a nine-year-old, is brilliantly captured in all her determination and fury and wisely sorrowful sympathy for the lost whale. But all the characters live on in my head - the painter and the man who's planting 3,000 trees; the woman who's come to the island to escape, and the sea and the beach and the small island itself, far to the north of these islands: they’re also characters in their own right and they're all living on in my head. 

 

the water all around us is a novel to remember, to cherish and to think about long after the last page has been turned. It's haunting, just the way the lost whale's song and Fenn's own song for him are haunting. I loved it and the echoes it's left me with. I think you'll love it too. 

Sula by Toni Morrison

dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring 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

4.5

Storygraph recommended Sula to me and I loved it. Thank you. The prose is miraculous and the story salutary and heartbreaking. From Toni Morrison's passionately eloquent Foreword she argues, in writing Sula, for 'fideilty to my own sensibility' which is 'highly political and passionately aesthetic'. She 'refused to explain or even acknowledge the "problem" [of being a "Negro" writer] as anything other than an artistic one.'

Writing about the characters in Sula Morrison says:

Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when - especially when - it is seen through the prism of economic freedom. The sexual freedom of Hannah Peach was my entrance into the story, constructed from shreds of memory about the way local women regarded a certain kind of female - envy coupled with amused approbation. Against her fairly modest claims to personal liberty are placed conventional and anarchic ones: Eva's physical sacrifice for economic freedom; Nel's accommodation to the protection marriage promises; Sula's resistance to either sacrifice or accommodation.

Read it. It's wonderful. 

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

There are so many characters in this novel but they're all given a distinctive voice by Wilkerson and the poignancy of missed meetings and too-late revelations (through lies told and lies lived by the next generations) is beautifully handled.

The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan

dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad 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

4.0

This is a beautiful poetic sad and ultimately hopeful book. Just my kind of story.

The House of Fortune by Jessie Burton

adventurous dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad 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 never read Jessie Burton's prequel to this book, The Miniaturist, but I promise you it doesn't matter if you haven't either. The House of Fortune stands on its own (with tantalising references to its forerunner which could easily send readers who haven't read The Miniaturist back to it).
 

But this is a magnificently intriguing story all on its own. (We're going to Amsterdam soon, which was a contributory reason for buying the book, not - of course - that it's anything remotely resembling a travel guide, it's set in the early eighteenth century. But some of the streets and canals still bear the same names so I'll find them when we go.) It's a mystery-filled story of identity and destiny and the influence the first has on the last. One of the characters says, about three-quarters of the way through:

I believe our fates are more in our own hands than we are prepared to accept.

But, just as in life, it takes the characters in this twisting, turning and beautifully-written novel, some time to realise that. I looked forward to finding out more every night and, now that I've finished it, I miss it, although the characters live on in my head (as do the streets and the canals). 

Someday, Maybe by Onyi Nwabineli

dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I loved this novel. Onyi Nwabineli has a great talent: her ability to make me laugh one moment and cry the next is mistressful, and her subject matter is brave. From the very beginning we know we're about to read the story of a young widow who is not okay but Eve (the widow)'s courage and humour, her desperation and her bleak self-obsession, her deep love for her dead husband and our constant hope that she will (and fear that she won't) survive her crushing grief are full of emotional truth. Not to mention the beautiful and beautifully lucid language, the perfectly-judged interweaving of the past, when Eve's husband was alive, and the present when her grief often overwhelms her, as well as the undercurrent of her mother-in-law's racism are all woven through this wonderful first novel. I'm looking forward to Nwabineli's next.

Here's a short extract that made me laugh and cry:

Nobody tells you how the first time you laugh after a major bereavement will destroy you. You may not have even registered that you don't laugh anymore - another point on the itemised list of things grief steals from you.
When you do laugh, you will freeze and your blood will run a little colder and it will dawn on you that this simple act, an act you performed routinely in the Before, seems alien to you. Then you will stop almost immediately because why the hell should you be laughing when your husband is dead. Laughter should no longer exist. 
...
Quentin and I spent most of our time laughing. Once he had acclimatised to my brand of humour (slightly dark, dry, steeped in cynicism) and I'd made peace with his (corny, almost infantile; fart jokes and the like), we laughed our way through more than a decade together. We developed inside jokes like very couple does. Q's laugh was a rambunctious animal you ought to but can't bring yourself to control. I was obsessed with it. I will never again get to hear him unlash his laugh all over the house. He is the thief of my joy, but to laugh feels like a betrayal.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

dark informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

Anyone who aspires to be a white ally to people of colour must read this book. It was published in 1963 and I wish I could say it wasn't relevant today either in the US or the UK. But it is. Still. But one way to make it irrelevant is to read it and think about (and later, act on) what Baldwin has to say. For instance, towards the end, from pages 81 & 82: 

A vast amount of energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man's profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man's equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. ...

It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word 'love' here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace ... in the tough and universal sense of being and daring and growth. 

And on page 84, Baldwin writes:

People who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.

I suggest that The Fire Next Time challenges white people like me to find that love, that universal sense of being and daring and growth: to grow up emotionally and spiritually and to act from that growth, in allyship with people of colour. 

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad 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

5.0

I'm biased, I love everything Sebastian Barry writes, in degrees of course, some books better than other (The Secret Scripture is an absolute fave) but his writing is always lyrical, lucid, poetic, rhythmic and soooo descriptive. So it doesn't matter if, sometimes, I can't quite work out why what happened happened. Old God's Time has been longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. I hope it's shortlisted ... and perhaps even wins.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
Did not finish book. Stopped at 0%.

It began brilliantly ... but somehow, after a while, it just didn't engage me. I have a feeling the fault is mine. Perhaps I'll go back to it, one day.