Category: Mental Health

On women’s hair and discrimination: Queenie & The Braid

11/4/2019

Hot on the heels of The Old Drift, I found myself reading another two debuts about hair. In the first, although I don’t mention it in my review, you can see from the cover image that Queenie has great hair; in the second, the title’s a giveaway. Both novels also address discrimination (albeit not deeply enough for my liking): in the first as experienced by a young black woman in London; in the second it’s the trials of a lower caste woman in rural India condemned to shift shit with her bare hands and a Canadian lawyer hitting a professional brick wall when she gets sick.

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Journeys of personal discovery: Blue Tide Rising & Island Song

9/4/2019

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Two recent debuts about women on an unplanned journey of self discovery: the first by finding a place of healing after years of trauma; the second by uncovering the truth about her parentage. Both women must travel to another part of the British Isles to find redemption; both must overcome obstacles to their understanding, to loving and being loved.

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Write drunk, edit sober?

8/4/2019

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It’s been an odd year so far on the creative front. After setting some grandiose fantasy goals about raising my profile, I succumbed to a virus which meant I could barely manage the weekly 99-word stories. But, once the acute phase was over, while still lacking the energy to leave the house, I found I could edit. Big time! So that what began as a gentle tidy-up of the (already much-edited) manuscript of my possibly third novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, cutting out modifiers like just and only (of which there were actually surprisingly few), morphed into a mammoth spring clean, where almost every word was subjected to the third degree.

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Disaffected mothers: A Perfect Explanation & Adèle

11/3/2019

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Enid is a Scottish aristocrat who has married ‘down’; Adèle a working-class Parisian who married into the bourgeoisie. Enid considers sex a painful duty; Adèle is sex obsessed. For Enid, work is for men and servants; Adèle has a job. Born almost a century apart, the ‘heroines’ of these debuts nevertheless have similar motivations: both have been emotionally neglected by their own mothers and feel shackled by marriage and motherhood.

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Teenagers in exile: Shadows on the Tundra & The Key

23/1/2019

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Two books about teenage girls forced from their homes in what initially appear to be very different circumstances. In the first, a fourteen-year-old Lithuanian is transported to the Siberian tundra in 1940; in the second, a nineteen-year-old is compulsorily admitted to a psychiatric hospital in mid-1950s England. The first memoir, the second fiction, both books are about the struggle to survive in alien environments.

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Irish debuts looking back: A River in the Trees & When All Is Said

18/1/2019

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Published this month are the debut novels of two promising Irish writers, both looking back to that country’s history, through the changes wrought by time on a family home. In the first it’s a humble farmhouse and overnight refuge for freedom fighters in the War of Independence, barely inhabitable when an exile considers buying it a hundred years later. In the second it’s the grand house of the local gentry when the narrator first crosses the threshold as a ten-year-old servant, and latterly the hotel where he reviews the eighty-plus decades of his life. And if you’re wondering about the coincidence of the blue covers, why not look back on this post?

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Out of their depth: Loyalties & The Death of Murat Idrissi

10/1/2019

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My first reviews of books published in the UK in 2019 are another two translations: the first from French and the second from Dutch. Both feature young people getting dangerously out of their depth, although, at 12 ¾, the boys in the first are probably around half the age of the young women in the second. See if either takes your fancy.

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War wounds in two French translations: Retribution Road & Small Country

7/1/2019

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When I shared my favourite books of 2018, I was disappointed not to be able to identify a single unifying thread. Except, perhaps, that each of my selected nineteen turned out to be so much better than I expected. Which got me thinking – and this isn’t particularly profound – how difficult it is to tell how much I’m going to like a book from the publisher’s advance information and blurb. That thought was at the forefront of my mind when I considered pairing my first two reads of 2019: both translations from the French set elsewhere, and featuring characters traumatised by war, but very different books. If you’re a regular visitor to annethology, I wonder if you can guess which of the two I was least looking forward to reading, but could well be one of this year’s favourite reads.

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Young women, invisible even to themselves: My Year of Rest and Relaxation & Pretend I’m Dead

31/12/2018

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I’m rounding off my reading year with reviews of American novels about women in their mid-20s who are estranged from everything, even themselves. While the first owns two properties and the second cleans other people’s houses for a living, they are equally desperately homeless inside. While the first namedrops designer labels, and the second cleaning products, both bring a light touch to the tragedy of feeling invisible and being insecurely attached.

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Hunger, madness and incarceration: Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry

28/12/2018

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Twenty-one-year-old Hiram Carver, assistant surgeon on the USS Orbis in 1833, senses something special about William Borden when he first sees him on board. The sailor exudes a quiet dignity that his upper-class superior officers seem to lack. So when he hears the story of Borden’s heroism in saving the lives of four men cast adrift for two months in an open boat following a mutiny, his admiration grows.

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Families in crisis: The Break & Ferocity

21/12/2018

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Two novels about the antecedents and consequences within the family when one of their female members is severely injured, both drawing on multiple perspectives to tell the story. In the first, set in Canada, the women rally around when a teenage girl is assaulted; in the second, set in southern Italy, and focusing primarily on the viewpoints of the men, the violent death of a daughter/sister/wife threatens to lift the lid on a web of corruption.

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Beneath the surface calm: Stories We Tell Ourselves & And the Wind Sees All

11/12/2018

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Reading these books consecutively, I doubted I could legitimately pair their reviews. The first focuses on the tensions in an Anglo-French family Christmas, the second an Icelandic fishing village anticipating a celebratory concert in mid-summer. But both are about the pain beneath a deceptively tranquil surface, and the psychological distance between people living in close proximity.

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Women who contain multitudes: Freshwater & Killing Hapless Ally

26/10/2018

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I’ve recently read two semi-autobiographical debuts about highly intelligent young women battling initially protective and subsequently persecutory alter egos to assert their real selves. The first set in Nigeria and the USA, the second in the UK, they provide fresh perspectives on the experience of mental disturbance from the inside.

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Mother issues: Leila & She Chose Me

14/10/2018

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Two novels with an unusual perspectives on mothers and mothering: the first an Indian dystopian novel about a woman’s rapid descent down the social scale after her husband and three-year-old daughter are taken from her; the second an English psychological thriller about a woman who never had, nor wanted, children who receives a Mother’s Day card in the post.

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Women who found husbands in a war zone: The Underneath & Pieces of Me

7/10/2018

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Two novels about British women working in a war zone: Kay as a journalist in Africa; Emma processing asylum applications in Iraq. Despite the dangers and deprivations, both felt invigorated by their work; something’s lost in marriage (plus children for Kay) and a move to the USA (temporarily for Kay with a summer rental; supposedly permanently for Emma and her soldier husband). Both novels capture the lure of extreme situations which, once savoured, set the women apart.

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Two more women in translation: Strike Your Heart & Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

6/9/2018

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Women in Translation month was barely over when I picked up these two novels that should help me beat the last twelve months’ total of seven in the coming year. The first French, the second Polish, both focus on women living their lives somewhat apart from their peers. Diana because, growing up without maternal affection, she fills her emptiness with work. Olga, on the other hand, is more outwardly eccentric, and her beef is not with a mother, but with men.

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In death’s waiting room? The Great Unexpected & Extinctions

24/8/2018

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I sometimes wonder if the link between books is too tenuous to pair the reviews; less often, I worry they might be too alike. These two new novels about curmudgeonly widowers reluctantly rubbing shoulders with other retirees in what feels to them like death’s waiting room seemed to belong to the latter category: second novels about men at odds with their grown-up daughters finding a kind of redemption when an unlikely friend intrudes upon their private space. Both have hints of humour and a quietly political backdrop of past injustice but, despite the surface similarities, once I was lost in the pages I realised that no two novels are ever the same.

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Lonely females on the family farm: Meet Me at the Museum & All Among the Barley

8/8/2018

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Having decided to pair these novels on the basis of the unlikely friendships I’d gleaned from the blurbs, I was pleased to discover other commonalities that caught my attention more. Both authors bring a female perspective to life on an East Anglian farm, albeit almost a century apart. While Tina Hopgood is in her 60s and Edith Mather only fourteen, both narrators are lonely, despite having family around them, and unsure about their right to choose their own future.

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Young Iranian women in exile: Disoriental & Call Me Zebra

6/8/2018

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Kimiâ and Zebra are women in their early 20s with roots in the Mazandaran region of Iran. Both have been shaped by their fathers’ intellectual and political allegiances that forced them into exile as young girls. Both have grown into young adults slightly distant from their own emotions but, while Kimiâ, now living in Paris, has forged an identity that separates her from her family of origin, Zebra, now an orphan travelling from New York to Barcelona, is disturbed and disturbingly loyal to her heritage.
Follow this link for other accounts of the refugee experience.

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Part-time mourning for writerly disappointments?

20/7/2018

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The writer’s life is rife with disappointment. One of the main factors differentiating the successful from the unsuccessful is not the degree of failure they encounter, but the ability and willingness to scrape oneself up from the ground and carry on. But how do we do that? The blogosphere thrums with posts on adopting an almost military discipline, but that’s not right for everyone. It’s not right for me.

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<<Previous

On women’s hair and discrimination: Queenie & The Braid

Journeys of personal discovery: Blue Tide Rising & Island Song

Write drunk, edit sober?

Disaffected mothers: A Perfect Explanation & Adèle

Teenagers in exile: Shadows on the Tundra & The Key

Irish debuts looking back: A River in the Trees & When All Is Said

Out of their depth: Loyalties & The Death of Murat Idrissi

War wounds in two French translations: Retribution Road & Small Country

Young women, invisible even to themselves: My Year of Rest and Relaxation & Pretend I’m Dead

Hunger, madness and incarceration: Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry

Families in crisis: The Break & Ferocity

Beneath the surface calm: Stories We Tell Ourselves & And the Wind Sees All

Women who contain multitudes: Freshwater & Killing Hapless Ally

Mother issues: Leila & She Chose Me

Women who found husbands in a war zone: The Underneath & Pieces of Me

Two more women in translation: Strike Your Heart & Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

In death’s waiting room? The Great Unexpected & Extinctions

Lonely females on the family farm: Meet Me at the Museum & All Among the Barley

Young Iranian women in exile: Disoriental & Call Me Zebra

Part-time mourning for writerly disappointments?

2019 Reading Challenge

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