angelayoung's reviews
336 reviews

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative reflective 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? It's complicated

4.25

Americanah is both a love story that isn't resolved until the final page, and a story of racism in America and how - in one of the novel's most heartbreaking and striking passages, Ifemelu, the protagonist, says, at a dinner party: I come from a country where race was not an issue. I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America ... but we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. It’s true. I speak from experience.

 

And two more, of the many words that will stay with me: Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it. And, Racism is absurd because it's about how you look ... . It's about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair. Black hair and the difficulty of finding a hairdresser who knows how to cut and style it, and wearing your hair as it naturally comes out of your head or having a weave or styling it in a way that singes your scalp but that makes it appear less Black, is a poignant running metaphor throughout Americanah.

It made me think hard about my white privilege and my subconscious racism. It made me commit, more deeply, to eradicating my racism and becoming an antiracist.

 

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

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

4.0

This is a glorious idea and one so full of hope. It's theme is the same as Midnight in Paris in the sense that our heroine (hero in MiP) discovers that the best age and time to live in is her own but the way she discovers it is so original and so very much to do with the power of stories, and the stories we choose to tell ourselves. Enchanting is the right word for this book, in all its senses.

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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
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

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.