Tag: life

Poppy Adams, The Behaviour of Moths (Virago 2009)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4539646-the-behaviour-of-moths?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=SnysdeNaQl&rank=1

Ginny is waiting for her sister Vivi in the crumbling family manse. They are from a long line of lepidopterists (butterfly and moth collectors). Now they are both old.
She looks back on their childhood, wondering what it was that changed everything. Vivi had slipped off the belltower 59 years ago and ruptured her womb. That was the start of it.
‘What have you done with the furniture,’ says Vivi, ‘all that priceless furniture?’
‘I didn’t sell any of the moths,’ she replies.
She becomes, almost by destiny, ‘the Moth Woman’. Clive does experiments to find out ‘what makes a moth a moth’. He believes that moths—and other animals—have no awareness, only instinct. With his new Robinson’s trap, he catches a Nomophila noctuella.
Vivi grills Ginny on the manner of their mother’s death—she had fallen down the stairs—but Vivi had not known their mother was a drunk. As Ginny, Vivi and Arthur conduct their own experiments on propagation and metamorphosis, Ginny struggles to keep secrets from everyone, only to find they have kept secrets from her.
A beautiful and innovative Gothic-style tale. There’s not so much plot action-wise; it is mostly the story of the relationship between two sisters as it evolves and the tangled webs they weave. I really loved the metaphorical parallels between the metamorphosis of moths and the cycle of human gestation, birth and death. Woven into these themes are stories of historical debates and experiments in lepidoptery during the period.
After reading this, I’m a little less disgusted by moths.

J. Everett Prewitt, Something about Ann (Northland Publishing Company 2017)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36556230-something-about-ann?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=f7CVDtR6Hu&rank=1

This novella is comprised of twelve interconnected short stories following a group of African-American soldiers who faced traumatic experiences in Vietnam during the 1955-1975 war. The wartime experiences of this squad were covered in Prewitt’s earlier book, A Long Way Back.
These stories talk about what it’s like to experience fear of death, horrific injury, blood and pain and grief—the devastating experience of dedicating one’s life to a cause that failed, a war that ended in embarrassing defeat.
These fictional stories follow the soldiers after their return home. Clarence Bankston falls for a Vietnamese nail salon owner he meets at a party, Ann Minh. Acknowledging the discomfort of the situation, having established they both ‘left in ‘69’, she is the one who apologises. Her real name is Ly Trung Trac; she is married; she is North Vietnamese.
Some of those who fought are still, years later, looking for revenge. As one veteran says, ‘if someone threatens you or your loved ones, and you are trained to kill, you tend to see every solution through the sight of your rifle.’ These vendettas intermesh with present-day conflicts over women or money.
Each man faces his demons from the war as well as the racism and other ills of the society they returned to.
It is written from the soldier’s perspective. Personalising the war experience recognises that the Vietnamese and the American soldiers were arguably ‘fellow victims’.
I liked the device of masking perpetrator’s identities using foreigners’ pronunciation of names (Mr Krantz, Mr Clarence). The portrayal of ways in which the veterans’ inescapable trauma affects their present-day struggles is intimate and profound. I loved the intimate peeks into a veteran’s mind of the one shying away from a fight for fear of hearing something he’d heard before, the smash of a head against the wall ‘like a watermelon’, and the one who kept his pistol under his bed until his wife threatened to divorce him, and the one where a shared wartime experience is powerful enough to break down the black/white racism barrier.
The ‘jungle’ metaphors are beautiful (‘like a sleeping panther that, if awakened, attacks’; ‘hunched like a water buffalo getting ready to charge’). The use of dialogue is excellent; the characters really come through.
It is best to read this work as a collection of short stories rather than as a novella. This format—interconnected short stories—means that some loose ends are left when each episode concludes. That leaves the reader to wonder what connects the stories; they are all connected by the theme of the struggle to come to terms with wartime trauma and the particular struggle of black veterans. ‘Some say that war produces 100% casualties.’

em.thompson, Krill (Eccentric Directions 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213563314-krill?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_8

6 stars. Anarchist-geeks take over the country using internet technology

John Tucker is about to jump off Suicide Bridge when he meets Kristy ‘Krill’ McGill. He talks him out of the deed by listing all the various painful and gory ways there are to kill oneself, and they strike up a friendship. Tucker tells McGill about his problems—a mountain of debt and a too-high mortgage after his wife left him. ‘Tyler can sort you out,’ he says, Tyler being someone who runs a hedge fund called Page-R, a ‘harmless little scam’.
Tyler suggests ‘Faustian bargain’, and Tucker’s house in Crouch End is converted into a high tech hub for manipulating the DeepNet, staffed by ‘rowdy yahoos’. Tucker joins the team. And yet, it seems there is something else going on. They call themselves the New Praetorians.
Tucker’s expertise from his corporate background, plus his new-found friends, enable him to cleverly turn the tables on his former boss at Poppy Seed Inc. He rejigs the company to fit the new objectives.
The protagonist/narrator’s journey is an interesting one, and profound, and a unique writing style—straight-forward, yet personal and sometimes emotional—contributes to pulling us right in. It becomes a story of redemption. The description of ‘coming in from the cold’, the process of recovering from a suicide attempt, was extremely insightful. The love story is intricate. The dialogue is wonderful, really painting the characters.
I found it a little bit strange that Tucker was roped so easily into Krill’s political programme. For someone to be in the top managerial position of a radical political programme to which he was ideologically ‘neutral’ seemed far-fetched. It’s an exhausting 117,000-plus words (needs cutting! Or dividing into Book 1 and Book 2) and gets long in places. By the time of the anti-IRA crackdown sub-plot, I was tiring.
Contains the great metaphor: ‘he picked up the patters [patois] like fag ends off the street’ and the lovely phrase: ‘afraid to close my eyes, perchance to sleep and blunt my dreams’. His ex-boss’ calling his ex-wife ‘the Russian girl’ is a great story. I love how Berlusconi the cat has a role to play. The return to the Suicide Bridge theme at the end was skilful and brought balance back to the sub-plot filled narrative.
The cyber-revolution gone bad is a common thriller theme, but the denouement to this one is especially exciting.

M. Stillman, In the Joshua Sea (Gneiss 2023)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208297629-in-the-joshua-sea?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=kWZGvXQerf&rank=1

6 stars

Desert flora and fauna—Joshua trees, brittlebushes, yucca moths, iguanas, antelope squirrels—form the background as humans drill for gold in 1929. Haberman, ‘the Captain’, has leased a portion of the old Anaconda Mine for a few months, which he’s working with a four-man team, Stan, Jem, himself and newcomer William Quine. William, a Native American half-breed, is in the desert trying to reconnect with his roots and/or strike gold.
The author admits an intentional parallel to Moby Dick. Haberman was a sailor in the Navy and remembers an influential encounter with a whale. The vast expanse of the desert is in many ways contrasted with the sea, and whale/deep sea-related metaphors are used to describe the desert and the characters’ relation to it. ‘Where Ahab is trying to hunt down the whale, Haberman is trying to get away from it,’ says Stillman. The desert is the opposite of the sea, and Haberman is the opposite of Ahab. The main protagonist William Quine, the Native American half-breed, has his analogue in Queequeg, a Pacific Islands harpooner who ‘marries’ Ishmael, Moby Dick’s narrator. Ishmael’s spiritual quest is paralleled with the spiritual quest of Quine to reconnect with his native roots. And the hubris of Ahab’s obsession with revenge is mirrored in the miners reaping the consequences of their rape of the natural world.
The opening and entire ending are absolutely fantastic. The chapter endings often draw parallels between the humans and the fauna, and many of the metaphors are really gorgeous.
The genius loci is genius. Most brilliant about this novel is the interplay between the humans’ narrative and the actions of the desert fauna. The descriptions of the desert animals are so important they become characters in the drama. The story moves slowly, alternating between the humans and the animals, insects and plants of the desert, creating a languid, hypnotic effect, like the shimmering waves of an oasis in the heat. We feel the baking heat of the desert sun, and in the silence, hear the beating of the hawk’s wing and the scatter of an ant’s run.

Paul Carlucci, The Voyageur (Swift Press 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/184573092-the-voyageur?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_21

Carrying supplies to Fort William to trade for furs, members of the voyageur (French-Canadian fur traders) brigade are dropping like flies from consumption. Alex wants to make enough money trading furs to buy a plot of land along the St. Lawrence for a peach orchard.
Alex makes his way in a multi-cultured, uncivilised land full of bad men out for their own advantage.
When they reach Mackinac Island they get in serious trouble. Alex’s experience is truly harrowing. He comes under the care of Dr. Beaumont—it seems Alex is a medical miracle. He learns some lessons in spirituality from some Nishnaabe (Ojibwe) Indiens. The miracle connects the inside of Alex’s body with the outside world in a graphic way, but the phenomenon has a spiritual side. He is nourished by the ghost of his ‘tit frère (little brother).
This novel deals insightfully with serious suffering in a harsh world. Alex’s thoughts as he confronts life-threatening situations are profound. We feel his pain, confusion, grief, loneliness. The admixture of French words and phrases is untranslated, which might be confusing to a non-Francophone [but hey, there’s Google Translate], and yet it adds an exotic feel for the time and place. It both accentuates Alex’s threatened innocence and lends an immediacy, in this wild frontier, where one never really knew what people were around the corner and what unfamiliar language they might speak. Alex is young and too frail to manage the woodsman’s life, and we follow along with his naïveté, stunned by the hardships and the betrayals of false friends.
I was amazed to learn that Dr. Beaumont’s experiments and this ‘medical miracle’ were historical.
Each point of view character has a unique voice, artfully done.
This is an astonishing tale of the wild frontier, sometimes shocking, sometimes deeply emotional.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

Fernando J. Múñez, The Cook of Castamar (Apollo 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/147982687-the-cook-of-castamar?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=nn8M3dGp0P&rank=1 

Clara, high-born but without means after the death of her father, obtains a position as assistant cook in the palace of the Duke of Castamar, Don Diego. She has agoraphobia and is afraid to go outside the kitchen. She is under the thumb of housekeeper Úrsula, who commands even the butler Melkíades, and the head cook Escrivá. Clara’s skill is exceptional, and she is promoted to head cook, whipping the kitchen into shape and producing culinary masterpieces.
There’s politics upstairs, too. Everyone has secrets—on which enemies of the duke seek to capitalise to wreak their vengeance.
Upstairs is Don Diego, his mother Doña Mercedes, his adopted black brother Don Gabriel, and his suitor Lady Amelia. Diego’s friends Don Enrique, Don Alfredo, Don Francisco and Mercedes’ friend Doña Sol are frequent visitors. A complex web is woven of secret vendettas and forbidden romances.
Clara is noticed by the duke, who is also bereaved, and an impossible romance brews.
Despite the jealousies downstairs and the machinations upstairs, Clara manages to act in each instance with integrity. She is called upon to save her master, her heroism all the more laudatory as she struggles against her condition. The Castamar brothers conclude that one should find one’s true self, fall into the arms of the person you love, regardless of their race or class. True nobility is from the heart.
Set very much in the time, with historical backstory and political intrigues. Deliciously detailed, right down to the porcelain. Contains some beautiful cuisine-related metaphors (e.g. ‘wobbled like a jelly that had just been turned onto a serving dish’). The descriptions of Clara’s experience during her agoraphobic episodes and as she tries to hide it are fantastic.
A gorgeous novel, best-seller in Spain. Has been made into a sumptuous Netflix series, with some unnecessary plot changes.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

Janet Gover, The Wild One  (Choc Lit 2015)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25183607-the-wild-one?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=4cFJ90sPBI&rank=1

Tyangi park ranger Dan is waiting by the billabong, kookaburra laughing, watching the brumbies (wild horses) drink at the waterhole. He is tasked with shooting them, a cull—they are non-native, damaging the parkland—but he’s not happy about it.
Quinn, photojournalist of some fame, is even less happy about it. She cooks up a plan to save the brumbies and shoot a photo-journalism story for Australian Geographic. Trish, manageress of the Coorah Creek Hotel, barman Jack and cook Ellen, Doctor Adam and his air-ambulance pilot wife Jess want to help.
When horse-breeder Justin and Carrie, a jockey retired from horse racing due to a serious accident, join the team, the project starts to look do-able. Carrie and Justin recognise the head stallion of the brumbies as being from a prized bloodline, offering Justin new breeding stock for his stud farm.
The free-spirited Quinn finds herself falling for hunky Dan, but they each have to bury some demons from their past before the camp side romance can become permanent. His from a war-time disaster in Falluja resulting from his failure to follow an order, hers from a failed marriage.
You will fall in love with the characters. They each offer their special talents to the brumby-corralling project, and they have to help each other work through their demons to get the job done. If falling in love should be the result, so much the better.
We enter a whole world, here, the Australian outback, a wild, beautiful world that humans are at pains to tame. We learn all about the business of corralling wild horses, too.
This is Book 2 in the Coorah Creek series. Quality chick-lit, beautifully written. Not really my genre, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Victoria Hawthorne, The Darkest Night  (Quercus Publishing 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63259977-the-darkest-night?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=hfljxCebya&rank=1

A haunting story of witches, family secrets and the pain that never heals

Ailsa Reid escapes to Fife after a scandal at work, to find her grandmother Moira missing and her grandfather Rupert injured.
In her search for Moira, she needs help from her estranged mother Rowan. The mother/daughter love/hate relationship is tense. Ailsa is ‘annoyed with how [her] name sounds in her mouth’.
The solution to the mystery involves witches, those gravestones on the hill, a mother and daughter, burned on the hill above the house, and an ancient curse.
Bed-bound Selina finds healing as her friendship with Elspeth grows. The two share a secret, yet Selina has a further secret, too. The arrival of cousin Samuel complicates matters. He ‘knows’.
I found the non-involvement of the police and the hospital strange. Someone has bashed her grandfather over the head, but the women just stay in the kitchen smoking cigarettes. And I wondered how Selina knew everyone in town when she had never left her bed.
Despite the worrying scenario of the injured grandfather and the missing grandmother, the story begins quite low-key, then building, alongside wonderful characterisation and family dynamics. It features several examples of beautiful writing about strong emotions. (‘Her thoughts crash into one another in her mind with explosive clangs.’)
The overall plot is very good, every element linking into every other element, frequently taking a dreamlike tone, as if we’re not really sure what is reality. Part II moves back to Moira’s childhood, which is a bit of a shift.
I love how we are fed the story of Ailsa’s work scandal bit by bit—first, a ‘name’, then an ‘allegation’, then an ‘incident’, then an ‘investigation’—and how it gradually connects to the missing grandmother story. Both witch-hunts, ancient and modern—’accusations flayed across their skin’—ending in the Reid family women finally finding each other.
This review originally appeared in Historical Novels Review.

Renni Browne, Dave King, Self-editing for Fiction Writers   (William Morrow Paperbacks 2004)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180467.Self_Editing_for_Fiction_Writers?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=hUFbV8cxLD&rank=1

The chapter headings say what you’re going to get in this manual: Show and Tell, Characterisation and exposition, Point of view, Proportion, Dialogue mechanics, See how it sounds, Interior monologue, Once is usually enough, and Sophistication.
A lot of it will be stuff you already know—create an ebbing and flowing rhythm between Showing and Telling; write your expositions in your POV character’s voice; Show emotion rather than explaining; use action ‘beat’s in your scenes and dialogue; use dialogue and interior monologue to portray your characters; Tell about setting in action and dialogue; don’t give us all the answers to the questions all at once; go easy on the speaker and thinker attributions; don’t use two characters or two scenes to do the work of one.
I’ve read this stuff many times, but it does not hurt to go over it once again. And each chapter ends with a few useful exercises where Browne and King show how editing looks in practice. (I would have liked even more)
Certain chapters, in particular Proportion and Sophistication, taught me things I did not know.
Proportion deals with identifying the main import of what you are writing. I’m often suggesting, in novels I edit, that authors should have no more than one or two beautiful metaphors or highly descriptive adverbs or adjectives per page. But it’s not a question of quantity, but rather of quality. Don’t go on and on, waxing lyrical with beautiful metaphors, about things which aren’t very important in the grand scheme of things. If plot developments are minor, they may not be worth a scene. If you spend time and energy establishing a state of mind, make sure it makes a difference, a turning point in their life.
Dialogue, mechanics and style are things you must develop as your writing matures. But some tips were a revelation to me. We should limit ‘doing x, she did y’ and ‘as she did x, she did y’ sentence structures, and don’t use adverbs. Instead, reframing them using dynamic verbs in action or dialogue. Instead of ‘you cretin, she said angrily, setting the cup down’, write ‘‘You cretin’. She slammed the cup down.’
Above all, read it out loud. Highlight in yellow passages that make you say, ‘ah, yes’, and those that don’t, edit.

K. M. Weiland, Outlining Your Novel (PenForASwordPublishing 2011)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12786668-outlining-your-novel?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=xNjxXQmjYn&rank=1

This manual reviews KM Weiland’s tips on writing Outlines for your novel. Each chapter also includes choice advice from several excellent and best-selling authors on the subject.
Contrary to popular preconceptions, writing an outline does not stifle creativity, it stimulates it, while crucially lending it structure. As you move from Conceiving to Outlining to Writing to Revising, you are moving backwards and forwards between your right and left brain, the analysis of the one and the passion of the other feeding into each other.
If you spend three entire months on your Outline, don’t sweat it, it might save you a year on the Revision.
Weiland goes through the main questions you should ask yourself as you go about composing your Outline. Most of them are ones you would assume, but it never hurts to read a book about it. Asking these questions from the very beginning not only saves you time on the Writing and Editing, it also provides direction. You can explore possible beats and directions before you commit hours to writing them (and get stuck with a bunch of ‘darlings’ which are painful to ‘kill’).
If you’ve already asked yourself the pertinent questions, your writing can flow from that by simply ‘connecting the dots’. Your writing will be more confident and your story will have better structure.
In the second stage, when you write your Extended Outline, you can brainstorm different ways to accomplish the main criteria you set out for yourself. E.g. She needs to be rescued by someone. Who would be the most interesting character to do that? What are 10 possible things that could happen? What are 5 possible outcomes from this situation she’s in?
My biggest take-aways from this book is that Outlining my novel can help me pinpoint where I need to up the stakes to ramp up the conflict and where I need to connect her external struggle to her internal struggle. And that to keep readers engaged, scene endings/chapter endings should have an inherent question: Will she win the fight? What’s in that letter she just opened?