| Four-year-old Danny lives with his Meemaw in a cramped rented flat. Like many little boys, he’s obsessed with dinosaurs and poo, loving the first and fearing the second, although perhaps not as much as he fears Karen, the new woman in his mother’s life. Is this down to Karen’s clumsiness around young children, or straightforward jealousy in a child accustomed to having his mother all to himself? Or does Danny intuit right from the start that Karen is bad news? Danny is a highly intelligent and perceptive child, sensitive to the pressures his mother faces while raging when he doesn’t get his way. As the novel’s narrator, he’s extremely sympathetic and endearing, leaving the reader in safe hands. Despite his child-appropriate fixations, he shows the harshness of the benefits system and the way a disturbed personality can cause chaos in other lives. And how could I not love a story with more toilet scenes than the six novels I featured for World Toilet Day last year put together? |  |
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Setting a novel in the near future requires two extra decisions. To what extent will this imagined world differ from what’s familiar today? What defines that difference? Although the social, environmental and technological developments or regressions in this fictional landscape are inevitably interlinked, one factor tends to dominate (and perhaps determines the readership to which it most appeals). At least that’s what I’ve been thinking since reading The Unit and Anna back-to-back (as well as recent dabbling in one of the subgenres myself). In the first, a democratic society has agreed (over time) that the lives of economically and socially unproductive citizens can be sacrificed for the common good. In the second, feral children roam a post-apocalyptic world in which adults have been wiped out by a virus and most of the infrastructure by a fire. Tempted? Read on!
Although these two novels couldn’t be more different in tone – the first a literary exploration of a young mother’s development; the second tricksy thriller – I can’t resist pairing them for the other factors they have in common. Both feature thoughtful, philosophising, unnamed narrators; both take as their subject matter how we explore the inside and outside of other people, and ourselves. Both are ambitious and unusual in their approach; both are the author’s second book and a cracking read.
Scouring my shelves for a book to accompany The Athenian Women, I thought I was “making do” when I picked up Such Small Hands: two translated and disturbing reads. So it was a bonus that the latter included a strand narrated in the first person plural (very like a Greek chorus as Edmund White points out in an Afterword), while the latter, set in Athens 411 BC, takes its characters to the theatre where a genuine Greek chorus stands on stage. Add in the similarities of the authors’ names (I’m assuming Italian and Spanish versions of Barber) and I couldn’t have linked them better if it was planned.
I recently featured four novels depicting the impact on children of a father’s absence. These two debut novels present the other side of the story: the terrible harm that a father’s presence can do. In both, the fathers control their children’s minds and bodies through violence and a perverted kind of love. Although fiction, each reflects the darker side of society today.
These two novels are worlds apart in terms of style and genre, but both involve mysterious deaths set against real-life moments of rampage and riot in England during recent hot summers. In the first, a lone gunman on the rampage in 2010 Cumbria is integral to the story. In the second, the 2011 London riots provide the perfect backdrop for a domestic noir thriller.
As illustrated in my posts, The Child in the Clothes of the Criminal and The mother and sisters in Underneath, the character of Steve, the narrator of my second novel, has been shaped by his experiences as a child with a depressed mother. This post highlights how the issue is addressed in my own and in other novels I’ve recently reviewed.  Allow me to introduce you to two translated novels with a supernatural element, albeit less central to the story in the second. Both also give a nod to mental health issues linked to criminality: via one of the off-stage characters in Norma; a neurological disorder thought to be Korsakoff syndrome for the unfortunate narrator of Black Moses. Plus a return to Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge. For another novel with a supernatural element, see my review of A Jigsaw of Fire and Stars.
If you like to be scared, Halloween is the time for it, and if you like to be scared by a book, any of these might do. The first two are about houses haunted by their history are described as Gothic horror. The third seems to be going that way, but then veers off into a different kind of disturbance which, for me, provided the richer read.
Life’s a game of snakes and ladders; we all have our ups and downs. But some people’s snakes are much longer than some other people’s ladders, and some so unlucky on the roll of the dice it’s like they’ve landed in a slithery nest of snakes. If fear or despair hasn’t shut down their emotions, these people are angry, understandably so. And that’s my tenuous link between these novels: the first about a young woman’s sudden blindness and the second about the victims of paedophile priests.
As far as I’m concerned, the welfare of babies and young children is a collective responsibility, so I offer no apologies for linking these three books. The first is a historical novel that begins with a fascinating account of the experience of a wet nurse in nineteenth century Spain, before moving on to the adult lives of the princess who had first turn at the breast and her milk brother, the woman’s own baby. The second is a contemporary novel set a century later, about a young American woman working as a nanny to a Japanese toddler. Both novels show the strength of attachment we can have to other people’s offspring. The third book is an uncompromising and moving memoir about a young Englishwoman who becomes pregnant as a student and decides to keep the child. Finally, because a baby is a kind of harvest of the womb, we finish with this week’s flash.
When I studied the psychodynamics of organisations, I learnt to be sensitive to how a social system responds to potential new members. Are they welcomed into the throng, no questions asked, or are they treated with suspicion, kept at a distance until they have demonstrated they’re “one of us”? No wonder “the outsider” crops up frequently in fiction, and where better than in the family which, with its own highly-developed and defended culture, is a social system in microcosm. So these two novels, the first set in India and the second in the USA, about what happens when a young woman joins a privileged family, appealed to me at the outset. They did not disappoint.
Apart from featuring supernatural rescues, these two novels have very little in common. But since I rarely read anything that takes me away from the rational, that’s enough to pair them in a post. While in A Jigsaw of Fire and Stars the spirits of the drowned migrants – plus a magic flute and a clutch of snakes – are firmly on the side of the good guys, the miracle cure in Fever Dream has a be-careful-what-you-wish-for flavour. Intrigued? Read on!
After reading The Things We Thought We Knew shortly before its publication back in June, I decided to hang back for another novel on psychosomatic illness or acquired disability with which to pair my review. But picking up The Burning Girl more recently, I was struck by the commonalities between these two novels, not only in the obvious sense of a girl in her late teens looking back on an intense friendship, but in the depth of disturbance resulting from its loss. As happened when I coupled two novels on male infidelity, discovering the similarities enhanced my appreciation of both. While neither pairing uncovered themes of particular personal relevance for me (which can enhance my enjoyment), the fact that they matter sufficiently for more than one author persuades me that other readers might find more to savour. Do let me know if that applies to you!
Much as we like to think we’d be willing to risk our own safety to come to the aid of a fellow human being, history shows that many of us aren’t brave enough to go against the grain. But even if we do find the courage to stand apart and make a difference, is the act that feels right necessarily the right thing to do? The conundrum of humanitarian responses to wartime atrocities seems to be the central question of these two historical novels, both set in a European winter, the first during the Second World War and the second in Bosnia, this latter by one of the founders of the humanitarian organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres.
A historical novel about Arctic exploration or a novel set in a near-future South Africa? A romance or an account of a relationship falling apart? A motherless girl or a fatherless boy? Wild animals or ice? Both of these novels explore the conflict and compassion that connects us to the natural world, but it was a bonus for me to read that the protagonist of Green Lion told his friend that his father was killed in a hunting accident in the Arctic, the setting of Under a Pole Star. Read on to see if I was right to pair these reviews.
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Annecdotal is where real life brushes up against the fictional.
Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin:
reader, writer, slug-slayer, tramper of moors, recovering psychologist, struggling soprano, author of two novels. 
My second novel published
May 2017.
My debut novel shortlisted for Polari First Book Prize
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I don't post to a schedule, but average around ten reviews a month (see here for an alphabetical list), some linked to a weekly flash fiction, plus posts on writing and my journey to publication and beyond. Your comments are welcome any time any where. Get new posts direct to your inbox ...
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