kitnotmarlowe's reviews
825 reviews

Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters by Laura Thompson
Did not finish book. Stopped at 7%.

Do not fucking read this.

 

Based on other reviews, if I had gone into this book expecting to learn anything about the Mitfords, I would have stopped reading after 10 pages. Despite knowing about the Mitfords, I only got through 29 pages (the end of the introduction) before I gave up. It's never a good sign when I check community reviews before finishing a nonfiction book, and The Six was no exception.

Laura Thompson looked at her cast of six women who lived six different lives across decades and countries, thought about how she wanted to structure her book, and then said, "Nah."

 Rather than dividing the book by era or sister, she throws everything and the kitchen sink into a blender, hoping for the best but achieving the worst. From the prologue on, the narration jumps between generations, themes, and families, with little regard for readers. What aspires to be gossipy and binge-worthy ends up full of meandering digressions within digressions. A rotten turducken of a book that befuddles readers into frustration. Thompson jumps around so much in the introduction that I'm not sure she could write four pages on the same topic. Losing your readers before they even reach the first chapter? A bad look. So many facts and figures are thrown around willy-nilly to obscure the fact that this book's central thesis appears not to be that the Mitfords could only exist in one specific context, belonging to a social class of impoverished aristocrats in a dying empire, but that the Mitfords were pretty cool, and we do want to be them.

 

Speaking of wanting to be a Mitford, aspirational is the best way I can describe the writing style. I haven't read anything by any of the sisters, but Thompson provides enough examples and references to Nancy's novels that I'm confident I could recognize a page from any of their work in a blind test.

Perhaps I'm unable to recognize the charm of such a style. There's something hollow about a homage I find frankly a little embarrassing, the way it is when the straightest woman you know is down atrocious for a white man who hasn't drank water since elementary school and will lie about his political leanings to sleep with her, like Laura, girl, get UP! You're embarrassing yourself! Not only is she afflicted with a terminal case of Mitford Mania, but she has blisteringly obvious biases toward the sisters. This is subjective beyond what the bounds of historical nonfiction should be.

 

Thompson already has a biography of Nancy and admires her as a writer, but Deborah and Diana are her favourites because they're the only sisters Thompson met in person. Jessica is a stupid extremist who was the only sister to lose her beauty in middle age because she's a filthy pinko. Pamela is nonexistent, which seems like what she would have wanted. And then there's Unity, but I'll get back to her later. 

Now, let's return to Jessica. Thompson disdains Jessica in the way that English people born in a specific era or class do, which I've dubbed Tory Prion Disease. 

Jessica, a communist, is a hypocrite for daring to show her family The Brown Book of Hitler Terror while, at the same time, Stalin was enacting his own terrors upon the Soviet Union (actually, on that note, I do not want to hear Laura Thompson's takes on the Holodomor. I do not want to know). Jessica, who never met Stalin and later condemned him—which her sisters cannot say for the objects of their own political affections—should be held accountable for every single casualty of the Great Purge, but Diana can be excused for not knowing about the Holocaust. The same Diana, who went on the radio in 1989, called Hitler a "fascinating" person with "extraordinary, mesmeric eyes" and said that of the six million victims of the Holocaust, "Oh, I don't think it was that many."

Jessica's communist cousin-husband, Esmond Romilly, who had his own flaws, is the devil incarnate for, uh, (checks notes) criticizing the British public school system, eloping with Jessica, and volunteering to fight alongside the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, despite Britain's official non-interventionist policy masking conservative hopes for Franco's victory. Meanwhile, Diana's odious husband, Oswald Mosley, literally founded the British Union of Fascists and is still described as striking and magnetic nearly a century later. Jessica withered into a middle-aged hag, whereas Diana was the most beautiful woman of her generation. Sidenote: Why is Thompson, at her advanced age, still associating beauty with good character like a child under double digits? Thompson undermines Jessica every chance she gets, pitting all of her sisters against her to prove her point. Every chance she gets, Thompson undermines Jessica, pitting all her sisters against her to make a point. While Nancy's heavily autobiographical novels are taken as gospel truth, Jessica's personal memoir apparently isn't a reliable source. Thompson can't even muster up pity when discussing how Jessica outlived two of her children. Absolute ghoul.

 

All I know is that if I had to choose between one sister who praised Hitler 40 years after his death and another sister who was involved in the American Civil Rights movement, my choice would be obvious, and it would not be the same as Laura Thompson's.

 

Unfortunately, we now have to discuss Unity. Thompson's portrayal of her is...confused. She is both an overgrown child in the body of a beautiful woman (rest in piss, Unity Mitford; you would have loved Poor Things, or whatever) who treats Nazism as a fun schoolyard game and a devoted, even militant Nazi who is fully aware of her actions. I have no doubt that Unity was a complicated and contradictory woman who, like her family and other British aristocrats, embraced fascism if it meant continuing their parasitic way of life and who chose allegiance to Hitler as one would choose a sports team to root for all to distinguish herself from her communist sister. Both of these things can be true, yet Thompson deploys one or the other depending on whether or not she wants Unity to be sympathetic.

 

Fascism was real to her, but not the systematic mass murder, just the tea with Hitler, the beautiful synchronicity of thousands of right arms raised in a perfect salute. Unity cannot be held accountable for gleefully egging on one of, if not the greatest, tragedies of the twentieth century because she was simply a silly, uneducated girl who had no idea what her crush on Hitler would lead to.

 

Except, of course, she did. Thompson makes the audacious claim that Unity couldn't possibly be antisemitic because she socialized with a select few Jewish acquaintances. After all, she was happy to stay in an apartment belonging to a Jewish couple on permanent vacation. The same Unity Valkyrie Mitford who, in 1935, wrote a letter to the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer, which read: "The English have no notion of the Jewish danger. Our worst Jews work only behind the scenes. We think with joy of the day when we will be able to say England for the English! Out with the Jews! Heil Hitler! P.S. Please publish my name in full, I want everyone to know I am a Jew hater." You want to argue that this woman was not antisemitic? (The word antisemitism does not appear in the index.) Laura Thompson, you have worms in your brain.

 

Also, while this is not one of Laura Thompson's many sins, it is a myth about Unity that I feel obligated to debunk. There's always a big hullabaloo about how she was conceived in Swastika, Ontario, and I must defend northern Ontario. 

Swastika, a mining town incorporated in 1908, was named after the Hindu symbol of good fortune rather than what it would later represent because it was, once again, a gold mining site.  

There were German ties to the swastika as an Aryan symbol going back to Schliemann at Troy in the late 1870s, and it was used as an incidental symbol of autocratic government during the 1920 Kapp Putsch. However, it wasn't adopted by the Nazis as their primary political symbol until 1920, and the party didn't come into power until 1933, almost 20 years after Unity's birth. 

I know this comes up as a point of discussion about her, but it's just a terrible coincidence. Yes, Unity's father was a fascist from a fascist family who named her in the hopes of forming an Anglo-German alliance during his life. However, he did not choose to conceive his Nazi super-daughter in Swastika as part of a larger evil plan. David & Sydney Mitford travelled frequently to Canada because they owned a gold claim near Swastika. Thank you for coming to my Tedtalk.

Finally, as long as the Anglosphere dismisses Mifordian fascism as a quirk of the aristocracy because they wrote about it in a remarkably unserious manner, we allow the myth of the benevolent, well-dressed, well-spoken, and well-educated fascist to endure. Their political views are easily dismissed as frivolous or eccentric—affected rather than deeply held convictions. However, you cannot make that argument when the eccentricity in question is FASCISM. I'm glad Unity was such an awful shot that she couldn't kill herself properly and spent 9 years suffering from a bullet in her brain. May I live to see a world that condemns her and her miserable, cowardly, shit-for-brains family. Amen.

 

A Fatal Crossing by Tom Hindle

dark mysterious slow-paced

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

1.25

I am about to say something so controversial yet so brave, and it is that Birch and Temple have wild sexual chemistry. I am absolutely positive that this was not Tom Hindle's intention and is entirely the result of the gay prion disease that has taken over my brain, but it improved my reading experience significantly. Had one of these characters been a woman, they would have fucked nasty mid-investigation. They should have fucked nasty mid-investigation regardless.

 

However, it is not hard to elevate this novel, even if it's through my own delusions since A Fatal Crossing is not a good book. I have a pretty high tolerance for terrible historical mysteries, but this may be in the top five worst historical mysteries I have ever read, and I have read dogshit like you wouldn't even believe.

 

For starters, at least 100 pages could be cut without consequence. The timeline spans five days but feels like five years. The chapters are relatively short, but the action is so repetitive that it becomes cyclical, dragging on like Hector's corpse around the walls of Troy. Every chapter goes like this:

Birch strokes the yellow ribbon and remembers his missing daughter; he and Temple argue (sexually); they speak with a suspect and receive little useful information; they argue again (sexually), and Birch's old war wound flares up. 

There's no reason for this to be nearly 500 pages long, especially since the characters (except Temple, who doesn't even have the decency to be the protagonist) are as lifeless as canned sardines. They're so generic that they're not worth keeping track of. By the end, I neither fully knew nor cared who was the murderer and who was murdered.

 

The prose is laughably repetitive. Each chapter repeats the same information about the ship's tonnage and splendour. I do not want to hear about a grand staircase ever again. Temple is constantly growling, sneering, scowling, or snarling. Nothing happens until the last 50 pages when I already lost interest. The twist at the end is the worst I've read since The Shape of Darkness by Laura Purcell. It's done almost entirely for shock value. Hindle does some decent character work in the final quarter, and once the relationship between Birch and Temple reaches its natural narrative conclusion, Hindle destroys it in the dumbest way possible. Unsatisfying and unearned. 

Sidenote: we learn that after Birch's daughter disappeared/was abducted/vanished into the ether, his wife blamed him entirely for not being there even though he was doing his job ON AN OCEAN LINER??? Miss girl, what were YOU doing that allowed your daughter to be abducted from right underneath your nose? 

Moonshine by Jasmine Gower

adventurous funny mysterious 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? No

4.0

This book surprised me. First, while I don't let other people's reviews influence my reading, the 3.45* rating is significantly lower than I would gravitate toward. Moonshine is far better than its low rating suggests. Secondly, it's urban fantasy, a genre I find inherently silly (a personal issue), particularly when it's historical or historically inspired and especially when magic and fairies are involved. And yet, not only did I enjoy Moonshine, but it's the rare standalone novel I wish was part of a series. I think that a lot of this is due to the setting.

If the copy didn't specify that Soot City is fantasy Chicago, I don't think I would've guessed. Then again, I have never been to Chicago and cannot easily recognize its landscape. One of the reasons I avoid historical fantasy is that the history is either left unchanged, aside from a few gimmicks or is treated as nothing more than set dressing. Gower does something fascinating in Moonshine by creating a world that, while analogous to America, bears little resemblance to it. Ashland is a land of volcanoes that has only recently become habitable, a new country covered in ashfall rather than rain. Not only is this idea fun, but it also takes an interesting approach to the melting pot mythology of American culture without the genocide upon which the country was founded. (For the record, it appears that all bigotry in this universe is based on magic.)

While Ashland may be recognizable as the good ol' US of A, 

Gower avoids another of historical fantasy's laziest tropes: making every fantasy country a perfect analogue to the real world. This is fantasy America, this is fantasy Japan, and this is fantasy France, etc. Here, you can intuit things based on character appearances, but otherwise, the countries are geographically and culturally unrecognizable from our own.

 

Moving on from the worldbuilding, I felt that the pacing was perfect for the page count, the conflict was resolved in a way that I honestly did not see coming, and at one point, I laughed so hard that I worried my downstairs neighbours heard me through the vents. The character work is a little thin (especially with the men, who I had trouble differentiating between despite there only being about 3 total), but honestly, it's not a major complaint in the grand scheme of things. 

The Meiji Guillotine Murders by Fūtarō Yamada
Did not finish book. Stopped at 19%.

I'm like those booktok girlies who subsist entirely on an anemic diet of wattpad-ass smut except in my case I'm absolutely obsessed with honkaku. So this isn't my first rodeo. It isn't even my fifth rodeo. But oh my god when I tell you I didn't know anything that was happening in this book. I didn't know who the main characters were, I didn't know what was going on, I didn't have any idea of when the titular guillotine murders would be committed, nor who would be committing them.

Absolutely inscrutable. There are better honkaku out there. Do not read this

38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier's End by Scott W. Berg
Did not finish book. Stopped at 45%.

After finishing The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson, I wanted to read a nonfiction book about the Dakota War. Plus, in a real "I saw Cady Heron wearing army pants and flip flops so I bough  army pants and flip flops" moment, 38 Nooses was one of the sources listed in Babbity Kate's 4 hour deep dive on Kirsten Larsen. Unfortunately this book was not it. 

I can't exactly put my finger on what went wrong, but I would classify it as an issue of propulsion. I put this book down to focus on something else with hopes that I would come back to it, and when I had finished my other book I realized that there was nothing keeping my interest. Nearly halfway through, the historical narrative feels as though it isn't moving at all. The Dakota War lasted five weeks, yet had repercussions that Dakota are still recovering from today. And yet, Scott Berg's narrative feels like one week of the war is five months, not from a surplus of detail but because he continues adding new (mostly white) characters each chapter, which then halts the narrative in order to introduce them before everything can be woven together. 

The Silence of Scheherazade by Defne Suman
Did not finish book. Stopped at 12%.

Absolutely could not stand the writing style. I'm not sure if it's an issue with translation or with the original text, but it flows so unnaturally. The syntax is all over the place; subjects and objects sprinkled willy-nilly throughout the text. Each sentence is filled to the prim with names and details which fail at any semblence of word building because half the time they're irrelevant to the greater story or even the rest of the page. Smyrna isn't a place, or even a specific moment in time, it's a jumble of words thrown at a wall like spaghetti. 

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Did not finish book. Stopped at 17%.

I feel like such a wimp for quitting so early in a book that's been on my tbr for a decade, but man, I could not get into this. I had a tone of trouble with the other Ishiguro I've read (The Buried Giant) to the point where I had to force myself to finish because I was buddyreading. So, all in all, I don't think he's the author for me. 

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

3.25

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

3.75

The Glass Woman by Caroline Lea

3.25