What I've Been Reading Recently

Recently I'm mostly reading the rather odd combination of feminist theory and Agatha Christie novels, the latter being just about all I can cope with, intellectually speaking, after grappling with the former! However, interspersed with the Judith Butler texts and Marple mysteries, I have read a few absolutely cracking books lately that I wanted to share with you.

The Wages Of Sin by Kaite Welsh*
Rating: ****
Sarah Gilchrist has fled from London to Edinburgh in disgrace and is determined to become a doctor, despite the misgivings of her family and society. As part of the University of Edinburgh's first intake of female medical students, Sarah comes up against resistance from lecturers, her male contemporaries, and - perhaps worst of all - her fellow women, who will do anything to avoid being associated with a fallen woman. When one of Sarah's patients turns up in the university dissecting room as a battered corpse, Sarah finds herself drawn into Edinburgh's dangerous underworld of bribery, brothels and body snatchers - and a confrontation with her own past.

If you're after historic fiction with feminist leanings and a Gothic Edinburgh setting - think Sarah Waters crossed with a Victorian Ian Rankin - then The Wages Of Sin is the book for you. With the medical student characters and glimpses into both high society and the degradations of those living in poverty, it reminded me a little of Sarah Moss's brilliant Bodies Of Light. It comes with a CN on discussion of sexual assault, which some may find triggering (and which I wish I'd known in advance), but that aside it's a superbly atmospheric read and Sarah is a heroine to root for. I'm hoping to see a follow-up to this soon. 

Hunger by Roxane Gay
Rating *****

With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn't yet been told but needs to be.

Whether it's writing about the rape that left her eating to make her body, in her words, "safer", or her unflinching account of society's hatred of fat bodies, Hunger was often a tough read. But I love Roxane Gay's writing, which is never less than raw, honest and true. Highly recommended. 

Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu
Rating: *****

Vivian Carter is fed up. Fed up with her high school teachers who think the football team can do no wrong. Fed up with sexist dress codes, hallway harassment and gross comments from guys during class. But most of all, Viv Carter is fed up with always following the rules. Viv's mum was a punk rock Riot Grrrl in the '90s, inspiring Viv to create Moxie, a feminist zine that she distributes anonymously to her classmates. She's just blowing off steam, but other girls respond and spread the Moxie message: Moxie Girls Fight Back!

A YA novel about using zines to start a feminist revolution is obviously right up my street, but what makes Moxie so brilliant is that it's not just about large acts of change but also about the small moments - for example, the subtlety with which Mathieu handles the love interest's "not all men" bullshit is especially well done, giving teen readers the tools they'll need to challenge such behaviour without being preachy. On top of which, Viv Carter is a wonderful heroine, totally relatable and utterly likeable. I want to press copies of this book into the hands of every teenage girl, not to mention every teacher who's ever dismissed incidents of sexual assault in the school hallways as "just a bit of fun". 

The Miseducation Of Cameron Post by Emily M Danforth*
Rating: ****
The night Cameron Post's parents died, her first thought was relief. Relief they would never know that, hours earlier, she'd been kissing a girl. Now living with her conservative aunt in small-town Montana, hiding her sexuality and blending in becomes second nature to Cameron until she begins an intense friendship with the beautiful Coley Taylor. Desperate to 'correct' her niece, Cameron's aunt take drastic action. Now Cameron must battle with the cost of being her true self - even if she's not completely sure who that is.

I absolutely raced through this lengthy YA novel, completely immersed in the lives of Cameron and her friends. What I found most impressive was the nuance with which each character is written: even the Pastor in charge of the conversion camp to which Cameron is sent is treated with sympathy, with the reader never allowed to forget that each person is human, not simply a villain or a hero. The Miseducation Of Cameron Post has recently been made into a film starring Chloe Grace Moretz as Cameron, and I cannot wait to see such a brilliant, important, heart-wrenching book on the big screen.

* I received these books from the publishers in exchange for an honest review.

What I've Been Reading Recently

July and the start of August haven't been great for reading: in July I was mostly incredibly busy and stressed with wedding and family stuff, and almost immediately after the wedding I fell ill and still haven't properly recovered. As a result, I've mostly been rereading for comfort - lots of Miss Marple mysteries and the whole Georgia Nicholson series - with a small sprinkling of new release thrillers and dystopias.

Fever*

Deon Meyer

Rating: ****

When I was at school we read Z For Zachariah and I was completely absorbed by its presentation of not just the dramatic events, but also the minutia of daily life and survival after a nuclear incident. Fever provides something of the same reading experience, dealing as it does with the establishment - by narrator Nico Storm's father, Willem - of a new settlement in the South African Karoo desert following a disastrous global pandemic. There is a refreshing focus on the mundane realities of survival, from planting crops and building irrigation systems to producing diesel from sunflower oil. The challenges of not just scraping by, but building a successful community, are made clear to the reader without the narrative ever feeling bogged down with detail. Excitement is provided by the regular incursions by groups of piratical raiders on motorbikes known as the KTM, and the battle scenes have a harrowing realism. Meanwhile, tension is derived from the fact that reader, from the first few pages of the book, knows that we are building to the murder of Willem Storm. Meyer is best known as a writer of Cape Town-set police procedural thrillers (which are, in my opinion, criminally under-read outside of his native South Africa) but this departure into dystopian post-apocalypse fiction is hugely absorbing, combining Meyer's knack for characterisation with his ability to pile on the narrative tension.

No Dominion
Louise Welsh
Rating: ****
Welsh's Plague Times trilogy has been a timely and inventive example of post-pandemic fiction, spreading the action across three books of varying tone: the first book in the series, A Lovely Way To Burn, was a masterful murder mystery-meets-disaster novel and introduced us to the character of glamorous TV presenter Stevie. The second, Death Is A Welcome Guest, followed stand-up comedian Magnus' attempts to get out of plague-hit London and to his  childhood home of Orkney. No Dominion is the final book and opens ten years down the line, with Stevie and Magnus both on Orkney, where a settlement of survivors has been established with Stevie as president. The teenagers of the settlement, however, are getting antsy and difficult (as teenagers do), and when a group of new arrivals turn up, events are set in motion which mean Stevie and Magnus have to leave the islands and head to Glasgow. Essentially a dystopian road trip novel, No Dominion was grippingly brilliant and it was a real pleasure to be back with the characters of Stevie and Magnus. As is typical of the road trip genre, there's an episodic nature to it which I thoroughly enjoyed (with their encounters at the castle of Lord Ramsey being a particularly enjoyable episode, with what I assume was a deliberate take on Game Of Thrones as modern dystopia).

True Love At The Lonely Hearts Bookshop*

Annie Darling

Rating: **

Verity Love, our titular heroine, is a vicar's daughter. We know this because we are told it repeatedly, in lieu of providing her with an actual personality. She's also an introvert, something that we're again repeatedly told - with introversion presented here as a pathological condition unique to our heroine, instead of a way of being for approximately 50% of the population, Seriously, there's even a whole scene where she solemnly sits the hero down and explains this terrible affliction called introversion. She has a cat, likes Jane Austen, and is so much a romantic fiction stereotype that I wanted to scream. Anyway, one day she has a meet-cute with handsome architect Johnny which leads, inevitably, to a summer of being each other's dates at various weddings, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, etc. Love, of course, ensues. As does boredom, on the part of the reader at least. Romance is not a genre I know particularly well but one author I do like and respect is Sarra Manning, so it was on her recommendation that I decided to read True Love At The Lonely Hearts Bookshop. After this experience, I think I'll accept that romance isn't my genre and move on.

The Good Daughter*
Karin Slaughter
Rating: ****
I'd been craving a properly involving, gripping thriller that wouldn't make me shout in frustration at ludicrous plot twists or grit my teeth at sympathetic depictions of police brutality, and The Good Daughter ticked all my boxes and then some. Slaughter's standalone novel, set in smalltown Georgia, is on the surface about two tragedies within the community - a family attacked 30 years ago by masked gunmen, and a subsequent school shooting in the present day - but it goes much deeper than that, asking challenging questions about guilt, complicity, family and trust. Refreshingly for a US crime novel, the town police are portrayed not as highly trained investigators who'll always save the day, but as bumbling at best and trigger-happy at worst, while the central characters are all entirely believable and utterly sympathetic.

* This title kindly provided for review by the publishers via NetGalley

What I've Been Reading Recently

I have read some utterly brilliant books recently - prepare yourself for many 5 star reviews! - together with one absolute stinker, which is sometimes as much fun to write about as a great book. What are you reading at the moment? I'm currently enthralled by Kraken by China Mieville, after it was recommended to me by my brother, and although it's out of my comfort zone it's completely absorbing.

The Upside Of Unrequited*
Becky Albertalli
Rating: *****
Molly and her twin have always been best friends as well as sisters, but when Cassie meets the girl of her dreams and falls head over heels, Molly's suddenly left behind. It's not that she's never been in love - she has, 26 times - but it's always been unrequited. Luckily, Cassie has a cute friend, Will, who's showing an interest in Molly... so why can't she stop thinking about her nerdy co-worker Reid?

Albertalli's first novel, Simon Versus The Homo-Sapiens Agenda, is one of my favourite books ever and the one I'm most likely to press upon friends while shouting, "READ THIS!" so it's fair to say that anticipation was running high for The Upside Of Unrequited. But I absolutely loved this sweet, charming, funny romance. It's fantastically diverse and, best of all, Molly is the fat YA heroine of my dreams. What leaps off the page is that Albertalli knows teenagers - knows what makes them tick, knows the cadences of their speech - and, perhaps more importantly, likes them. Her characters are fully-rounded, interesting, flawed beings, with whom the reader cannot help falling in love. This book would have been so, so important to me when I was a teenager and I'm not too proud to admit that even now, I cried happy tears at seeing a fat girl (with lesbian moms! It me!) represented on the page. And for Simon... fans there's the added Easter Egg of a guest appearance by the man himself.

One Of Us Is Lying*
Karen McManus
Rating: *****

Five students enter detention, only four come out: the jock, the swot, the homecoming princess, and the rebel, leaving the much-disliked Simon Kelleher - the brains behind a devastatingly accurate school gossip app - dead. And so begins a police investigation that has the power to destroy all their lives and root out secrets they'd all prefer were kept buried.

One Of Us Is Lying is an absolutely brilliant read. Despite accurately guessing whodunnit at about 20% - I read a lot of thrillers and this is frequently an issue for me - I still felt compelled to keep reading. The characters of Cooper (jock), Bronwyn (swot), Addy (princess) and Nate (rebel) are so fully rounded that I was more than happy to go on this journey with them, despite knowing where we'd end up. Comparisons to The Breakfast Club are inevitable, but this is so very much more than that film: more complex, with more likeable characters, and with much greater tension and higher stakes.

The Pearl Thief*
Elizabeth Wein
Rating: *****
Sixteen-year-old Julie Beaufort-Stuart is returning to her grandparent's ancestral home for one last summer, after the death of her grandfather forces the sale of the house and land. This, together with the mysterious disappearance of the family pearls, followed closely by the discovery of a body in the river, leads Julie into a summer of self-discovery. Although The Pearl Thief is being marketed as a 1930s period mystery, in the vein of Agatha Christie, it's so much more than that. Yes, there's a mystery element, but it's less important than the exploration of topics as varied as burgeoning sexuality, disability, anti-traveller prejudice, and privilege. Julie - who could so easily come across as just another poor little rich girl - is instead winningly self-aware and willing to examine her own privilege, and the novel has a beautifully elegiac tone (the more so when you realise it's set in 1938 and that the shadows of war hang over all). A lovely book that will appeal to readers of all ages.

Sometimes I Lie
Alice Feeney
Rating: *
Amber, our narrator, is in hospital in a coma. We know this because she tells us immediately, along with two other salient facts: her husband doesn't love her anymore, and sometimes she lies. Sounds intriguing, right? Well, within the first 10 pages of Sometimes I Lie Amber had employed "rape" as a verb to describe something other than sexual assault, and used horribly derogatory language to describe a fat character, so it's fair to say I wasn't well-disposed towards it from the start and, unfortunately, it doesn't get any better. The plot - switching from Amber's hospital bed recollections of the days leading up to the accident that put her in a coma, to childhood diary entries - is utterly ridiculous and the only reason I read to the end instead of DNF-ing was because I was stuck on a train with nothing else to read. If you're in the market for a ludicrously far-fetched thriller, in which virtually every character is thoroughly unlikable and completely unbelievable, and with a laughably bad denouement, then maybe this is the book for you. It certainly wasn't for me.

The Lauras*
Sara Taylor
Rating: ****
Alex is 13 when Ma pulls them out of bed and into the car and embarking on a road trip across America, sometimes settling in one place for months at a time, at others staying briefly before moving on. The Lauras is so named for the girls and women from Ma's youth, which she spent in and out of foster care, and about whom Alex is regaled with tales. It is through these stories, told during their years on the road, that Alex learns to view Ma as more than just a mother but as a person too.

The novel has an episodic feel and, despite the potential for repetition inherent in the narrative moving from gritty motel to dusty road to gritty motel, each stop along their journey is beautifully drawn in immersive and lyrical prose. Neither Alex nor Ma have uncomplicated lives, and it's not a book that ties everything up in a neat bow at the end, but there was a sense of hope nonetheless. By far the best coming of age novel I've read in years.

Who Runs The World?
Virginia Bergin
Rating: ***
"They said that," he murmured, "They said you was lost without us."
"We are not lost," she said, calmly, "We are running the world."
Sixty years after a virus wiped out almost every man and boy on the planet, teenager River is being brought up in the Matriarchy, a place where war has ended, greed and violence not tolerated, and empathy is the prized quality in a person.

Who Runs The World? has a brilliant premise and it is, for the most part, well executed. Because it's a middle grade/YA novel it's not always as complex as, say, Naomi Alderman's equally feminist dystopian novel The Power. And as the pace picks up towards the end, things become over-complicated and under-explained. However, River is a great protagonist - well-rounded and sympathetic, although not always likeable - and the world that Bergin creates is entirely believable. A warning, though: it's impossible to read this without the Beyonce song cycling constantly through your head!

* This title kindly provided for review by the publishers via NetGalley

What I've Been Reading Recently

I spent a lot of February struggling with reader's block, but in between the unfinished reads and the unfulfilling struggles with books, I did also manage to read some crackers. Unfortunately, two of my favourite books - The Pearl Thief by Elizabeth Wein and The Upside Of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli - aren't published for another month or two and are thus embargoed, but there were plenty of other books that I enjoyed (and one or two I didn't).

The Chalk Pit*
Elly Griffiths
Rating: *****
A new Ruth Galloway novel is always cause for celebration, and the latest is no exception to the brilliance of this Norfolk-set series. When forensic archeologist Ruth is called in to examine some bones found in an ancient tunnel under Norwich town centre, neither she nor DCI Nelson expect her case to intersect with his investigation into a series of disappearances and murders in Norwich's homeless community. The joy of these books lies less in the detecting - although there are some moments of genuine tension and fear in The Chalk Pit, and there are a number of satisfying twists to the tale - but in the wonderfully real characters. From academic Ruth, the irascible Nelson, eccentric druid Cathbad, his partner and Nelson's DS Judy, to the unreconstructed, McDonalds-munching policeman Cloughie, each character feels more like a friend as the series develops. Combine this with Griffith's wonderful descriptions of the North Norfolk coast, and you have all the ingredients for a perfect crime novel.

The Good People*
Hannah Kent
Rating: ****
Hannah Kent's debut novel, Burial Rites, was my book of 2012 and is consistently my most-recommended title at work. So I had extremely high hopes for this book and they were, for the most part, realised. The Good People moves from the bleak landscapes of 19th century Iceland to the similarly bleak landscapes of 19th century Ireland, and follows three women - widow Nora, her young maid Mary, and local healer and midwife Nance, who is relied upon but distrusted by the villagers. Nora is struggling to raise her disabled grandson in the face of local mutterings: that he's a changeling, that the real Michael has been stolen by the Good People of the forest, that he is bringing bad luck to the settlement. She believes Nance can help her and, such is the power of the writing, that as a reader I believed it too.

Indeed, the wonder (and the horror) of the book lies in Kent's demonstration of how easy it is even for good people to be swept away by belief and superstition; how we can justify terrible acts to ourselves. In this sense, we can understand the 'good people' of the title to refer to the protagonists as well as the fairy folk. The Good People is a haunting, atmospheric and devastating examination of folklore, belief and superstition: very much recommended.

Uprooted
Naomi Novik
Rating: ***
Alex told me about Uprooted and, as her last two recommendations (The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet and Daughter Of Time) have been such great reads, I put it on hold at the library. And it's really hard to explain why I didn't love it, because it had all the ingredients of a great book: Eastern European folklore & fairy tales, magic, plucky young heroine, to name just three. But I found the narrative a little disjointed and never quite connected with the character

Not If I See You First
Eric Lindstrom
Rating: ****
Another recommendation, from Rebs this time, and I absolutely loved it. When she was 7, Parker was in an accident that cost her her mother and her sight. Now 16, she's ballsy and bitchy as hell, determined not to cry over the death of her beloved father 3 months before. Not If I See You First is a brilliant contemporary YA novel. Although it has elements of romance, it's far more about Parker's friendships, which are just brilliant (with the characters of Sarah and Molly being especially well-realised). These teen girls are complex, interesting, witty and fully rounded characters who are just a sheer pleasure to get to know as a reader.

Let The Dead Speak*
Jane Casey
Rating: **
18 year old Chloe returns to the London house she shares with her mother, Kate, to find the house covered in blood and Kate gone. With no body but everything pointing to murder, DS Maeve Kerrigan and her team are called in to investigate, but matters are complicated by her prickly new DC, Georgia, and her fractious relationship with DI Derwent. The mystery itself is satisfactorily twisty, with a great final reveal just when you think it's all solved. However, this is the 7th book in the series but the first I've read, and I think I'd have benefited from starting at the beginning - although it does work as a standalone novel, I found it hard to connect with Kerrigan & Derwent. Their friendship and banter is clearly a central part of the books, but I couldn't get to grips with the nature of their relationship or feel properly invested in them and, by default, the investigation.

 * This title kindly provided for review by the publishers via NetGalley. 

What I've Been Reading Recently

I've made a good start to 2017, racing through 20 books in January and loving many of them. I'm no longer blogging every book I read as it was too onerous a task, but I've started using Goodreads to keep a record (feel free to friend me on there if you want a nosy at some of the other books I'm reading).

The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet & A Closed And Common Orbit
Becky Chambers
Rating: *****
These books are astonishingly good. Chambers creates a fully realised universe complete with varied alien species, a complex political back-story and, most importantly, entirely believable and relatable characters (even when said characters have tentacles or scales). The first book takes an episodic form, with the reader getting to know the crew of the tunnelling spaceship, The Wayfarer, as they embark upon a long journey to, yes, a small and angry planet. Eschewing the usual Big Bads and battles of sci-fi literature and instead focusing on the characters and their stories, The Long Way... is also admirably diverse in terms of race, gender & sexuality, and all the more enjoyable for it. A Closed & Common Orbit was a wonderful follow-up focusing on the AI Lovecraft and Pepper, two minor characters from the first book, and asking some big questions about what makes a person a person.

Juliet Takes A Breath*
Gabby Rivera
Rating: *****
Bronx-born and bred Juliet is getting to grips with her summer internship in Portland, Oregon (where she'll be working for iconic feminist author Hawthorne Brisbane), all while figuring out how to come out to her family, what the hell a preferred gender pronoun is, why she's not getting the answers she wants from White Feminism. Oh, and how to breathe. Juliet Takes A Breath was the queer, Latinx, intersectional feminist coming-of-age novel of my dreams: moving, political, angry, funny, and damn wonderful. Read it!

The Daughter Of Time
Josephine Tey
Rating: *****
Alex has been encouraging me to read this for bloody ages and I've no idea why I resisted so long, because it is absolutely brilliant. The Daughter Of Time begins with Inspector Grant laid up in bed with a broken leg. Encouraged by a friend to find something to pass the time, he lights on a postcard of a portrait of Richard III and decides to investigate the story of one of history's most notorious kings. Namely: can Grant reconcile the mild-mannered-looking man of the portrait with the accusations of child killing levelled at Richard?

The Muse
Jessie Burton
Rating: ***
I found a signed hardback copy of The Muse for 50p in a Leeds charity shop and obviously snapped it up. I loved The Miniaturist, so was interested to find out how Burton would follow such an atmospheric and richly descriptive book. Not awfully well, was the answer. The Muse follows dual timelines - Trinidadian immigrant Odelle in 1960s London, and artist Olive in Spain in 1936 - but while I was gripped by Odell's story, I couldn't take to Olive nor to the story told through her eyes at all.

Her Every Fear*
Peter Swanson
Rating: *
Still traumatised after a brutal attack by an ex-boyfriend years earlier, Kate Priddy makes an uncharacteristically bold decision when her cousin, Corbin, suggests an apartment swap, and she moves from London to Boston. However, arriving at his building she finds that his neighbour, Audrey, has been murdered. Comparisons to Hitchcock - and particularly Rear Window - abound in reviews of Her Every Fear, and the similarities are obvious as the plot revolves around a peeping tom. But this, for me, was one of the key problems with the book: the peeping tom character is presented as almost wholly unproblematic and (SPOILER) a good romantic choice for Kate. Because girls just love an obsessive stalker as a love interest, amirite ladies? More importantly, Her Every Fear felt derivative and predictable. As the plot developed, I found myself skimming pages until I reached the dénouement, which unfolded exactly as I'd forseen. This came as a disappointment after his wonderfully plotted and genuinely shocking The Kind Worth Killing: if you are looking for a truly unique and well written thriller, I suggest you look to that book rather than Her Every Fear.

The Clockwork Sparrow & The Painted Dragon*
Katherine Woodfine
Rating: ***
I'd seen the Sinclair Mysteries series compared to the wonderful Wells & Wong mysteries by Robin Stevens, so when I spotted the first book in a charity shop for £1 - and subsequently got the new title from NetGalley - I was keen to read them. Set in Edwardian London, with the action focusing on the young employees of grand new department store Sinclairs, they're jolly romps of the kind I loved when I was 10. They worked less well for me as an adult reader than the superlatively plotted Wells & Wong books, but you'll still be rooting for our heroines Sophie and Lil as they race across rooftops, foil dastardly plans, and escape from locked cellars.

* This book was kindly provided by the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

2016: A Year In Books

Despite the resolution I made this time last year to read more varied genres, in 2016 I once again stuck to a fairly limited diet of crime, thrillers and YA, with a smattering of literary fiction and non-fiction (all links will take you to my original review of the book).

Best Book I Read In 2016 (Broken Down By Genre If Necessary)
YA
I really enjoyed Dumplin by Julie Murphy, gloriously fat-positive YA and a book I would have loved to have read when I was a teenager. I also adored This Song Will Save Your Life, which reflected many of my own teenage experiences.
Contemporary/Literary Fiction
The Museum Of You by Carys Bray was just stunning: a moving meditation on grief and family, and properly funny too.
Sci-fi/Fantasy
I read the Daughter Of Smoke & Bone trilogy at the very start of 2016 and was absolutely hooked. Fantasy is not my usual cup of tea, but this tale of the battles between chimera and angels, across multiple worlds, transcend genre.
Thriller
I read Lie With Me when on holiday in September and thought it was brilliant, while The Kind Worth Killing is one of the best psychological thrillers I've ever read, and one I've pressed upon many other readers.
Non-Fiction
A Man Of Good Hope by Jonny Steinberg chronicles the life of one Somalian refugee and is absolutely essential reading in today's world.

Most Surprising (In A Good Way) Book Of 2016
I love Pride & Prejudice and I love Curtis Sittenfeld, so it shouldn't be surprising that I loved Eligible, her modern take on P&P. And yet I've hated most of the other Austen Project books, so I was shocked but thrilled to adore this.

Book I Read In 2016 That I Recommended Most To Others
As my job is now literally recommending books, there are so many I could mention here. But outside of work, my most recommended books have to be the Murder Most Unladylike series. I ended the year by buying piles of them for my nieces.

Best Series I Discovered In 2016
As someone who's not overly keen on reading series (I hate having to commit myself to anything beyond one book), I'm surprised to find that for 2016, this is a difficult one. The Wells and Wong series, as mentioned above, was one of my favourite finds, as was the Daughter Of Smoke & Bone trilogy. But as I've already talked about them, I'll go for the Spinsters Club series by Holly Bourne. Properly funny feminist YA fiction? I'm so there.

Book I Was Most Excited About & Thought I Was Going To Love, But Didn't
The Art Of Being Normal had been critically lauded both on the Bookstagram/book blogging scene and in the mainstream media. So I was disappointed to find it was not only a fairly middling read but also super problematic on class. If you're looking for YA with a trans heroine, If I Was Your Girl is a far superior book, and written by a trans author too. The #ownvoices campaign is something that I'll be getting behind in 2017.

Best Book That Was Outside My Comfort Zone Or From A Genre New To Me
I wouldn't have discovered Lucy Knisley's lovely graphic memoirs if it weren't for Laura mentioning that her new book was about marriage. As I'm in the midst of planning a wedding, I decided to take a look and I'm so glad I did. Something New was exactly what I needed to read - her reflections on bi erasure and what it means to be a queer woman marrying a straight cis man were particularly valuable to me - and I've since hunted down all her backlist, too, as well as seeking out more graphic novels.

Favourite Book From An Author I've Read Previously
I've found David Levithan's recent work very hit-and-miss, but You Know Me Well, his book with Nina LaCoeur, was a lovely queer YA novel as much about the important of friendship as about romance.

Best Book I Read in 2016 Based SOLELY On A Recommendation From Someone Else
I don't think I'd have picked up Deon Meyer's Benny Griessel series were it not for the constant recommendations from my aunt in Cape Town. But they're properly brilliant: high octane police procedural thrillers, but with the added benefit of insight into modern-day South Africa. Oh, and amazing settings too.

Favourite Cover Of A Book In 2016
Umm hello? Just LOOK at the cover of Dumplin'! I think I'm going to adopt Go big or go home as my motto for 2017.

Book That Had The Greatest Impact On Me In 2016
The book that, according to Kirkus, could "have been titled Black Lives Matter", Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is tough but essential reading.

Book That Had A Scene In It That Left Me Reeling And Dying To Talk About It With Someone
Another series I loved in 2016 was Charlaine Harris's Midnight, Texas series. And it didn't so much leave me reeling as wanting to talk about the multiple plot revelations across the series. It's impossible to describe the characters without major spoilers, so reviewing it was a challenge.

Favourite Relationship From A Book In 2016 (be it romantic or friendship)
The fierce father-daughter love between Darren and Clover in The Museum Of You.

Genre I Read The Most From In 2016
YA and crime, again. I'd rather be relaxing with another crime novel or YA romance than plodding through Bleak House, and I'm past feeling I need to apologise for this.

Best 2016 Debut
I thoroughly enjoyed Missing, Presumed, a superior crime novel with a political conscience, but strictly speaking it wasn't Susie Steiner's debut novel, just a debut for the series. Not Working by Lisa Owens - think Bridget Jones for the millennial generation - was probably my favourite actual debut.

Book That Made Me Cry (Or Nearly) In 2016
I sobbed like a baby at the afterword to When Breath Becomes Air, in which the author's wife describes his peaceful death from cancer. Unfortunately, I was on a train in Belgium at the time and got some rather odd looks.

Book I Read In 2016 That I Think Got Overlooked When It Came Out
I know this comedy of manners wasn't to everyone's tastes, but I really enjoyed Modern Lovers by Emma Straub and didn't see it mentioned much when it came out. I also really loved Naomi Alderman's feminist dystopia The Power, which was reviewed glowingly in the press but hasn't had quite the promotion I think it deserved.

Total Number Of Books Read In 2016
2016 was the year I stopped blogging every book I read, so unlike previous round-ups I have no idea what my annual total is: around 200, at a guess? The vast majority of what I read was by women authors, both cis and trans, but I could still do better at reading more books by PoC, so that's one goal for 2017 (and luckily, Americanah by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie is top of my TBR pile, so I'll start 2017 as I mean to go on). However, my 2016 goal was to read less crime, and that didn't exactly come to pass....

What I've Been Reading Recently

The Girl Who Saved Christmas*
Matt Haig
Rating: **
A Boy Called Christmas (released last year) was as festive as it gets, providing a wonderfully heart-warming origin story for Father Christmas. This follow-up focuses on the deliberately Dickensian story of London chimney sweep Amelia, orphaned at Christmas and condemned to the workhouse. As saccharine sweet as a candy cane, this is a sequel that doesn't quite live up to the promise of the first book. I enjoyed the cameo by Charles Dickens but, overall, I'd stick with the original unless you have small children of your acquaintance with whom to share this story. 

Murder Under The Christmas Tree
Assorted authors
Rating: ****
Murder Under The Christmas Tree does what it says on the tin: a collection of festive crime short stories by authors as diverse as Ian Rankin, Margery Allingham and Ellis Peters. If you're a connoisseur of vintage crime you may already be familiar with some of the older pieces, such as the Lord Peter Whimsey story, but overall this was a lovely read: entirely unchallenging (in a good way) and as cosy as a log fire.

Let Them Eat Chaos*
Kate Tempest
Rating: ****
A polemic in poem form, in Let Them Eat Chaos Tempest examines the isolation and alienation of modern life via seven characters who live on the same London street. Taking in everything from Brexit to the refugee crisis, austerity, climate change, and the failures of neoliberal capitalism (which makes it sounds a bleak read), it is also exceedingly entertaining and begs to be read aloud; in fact, Tempest has written a foreword to this effect and it is is also available as an album. A powerfully moving call to arms that I know I will revisit when trying to process the events of 2016.

This Song Will Save Your Life
Leila Sales
Rating: *****
Elise is an outsider - when she's not being ignored at school, she's being laughed at - and this leads her to self-harm. And then, on one of her nightly walks around town, unable to sleep, she stumbles upon an underground indie club night. She makes friends (the fat- and slut-positive Vicky is one of my favourite book characters of 2016), she falls for an unsuitable boy, and she finds her salvation in DJing. There was so much in This Song Will Save Your Life that reminded me of being a teenager and I think a lot of people who were indie weirdos at school will feel the same. Is the plot completely perfect? Well, probably you can't become a hotshot indie DJ with a few weeks of practice, no. But I loved it regardless.

Dangerous Women*
Roxane Gay
Rating: *****
Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist is one of my favourite of the recent crop of feminist essay collections, so I leapt at the chance to read Dangerous Women before its January release. A short story collection, its recurring themes - race, gender, abuse and violence against women - make this a sometimes tough but always necessary read. Each story unfolded slowly and carefully: never did I feel that they were rushed, nor were they overlong. I came away feeling enriched by the glimpses of the characters lives and their resilience. Without a doubt my favourite short story collection since Jhumpa Lahiri's very different but equally superlative Interpreter Of Maladies.

* This book was kindly provided by the publishers via Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

What I've Been Reading Recently

The Sun Is Also A Star
Nicola Yoon
Rating: ****
Nirvana fan and budding scientist Natasha is having the worst day of her life when she meets Daniel on the streets of New York. There ensues an extremely sweet, entertaining and heart-warming love story, with added physics. What raises The Sun Is Also A Star* above your standard contemporary YA, though, is Yoon's deft touch for character; she brings every person to life on the page with touching and occasionally devastating vignettes that show how the tiny gestures we make on a day-to-day basis can have enormous knock-on effects.

The Power
Naomi Alderman
Rating: ****
The Power* poses the question: what if the power to hurt were in women's hands? If, with a flick of the wrist, women and girls could cause agonising pain and death? It begins as the ultimate feminist revenge fantasy, as women strike back after thousands of years of patriarchy: oppressive regimes in the Middle East are overthrown; women empowered the world over. But - despite the dark humour - it quickly becomes clear that this is no feminist utopia. As the world heads towards a cataclysmic event, we discover that power will always be abused, no matter who wields it. This is a violent, brutal  page-turner of a dystopian novel, and I heartily recommend it.

If I Was Your Girl
Meredith Russo
Rating: ****
Amanda is 18 and about to start her senior year at a new high school. What her new friends don't know, however, is that Amanda was born Andrew. Being a little bit tired of cisgendered people telling trans stories (*cough* Lisa Williamson *cough*), I was excited to read a trans author's take on YA. And one thing I particularly enjoyed about If I Was Your Girl was the fact that - some flashback chapters apart - this was a post-transition story. It was also a fairly straightforward 'new girl at school' tale, and all the better for it, demonstrating that Amanda's life isn't centred around being trans: she has the same worries - making and keeping friends, crushes, college plans - as any other teenage girl.

Lie With Me
Sabine Durrant
Rating: *****
Lie With Me is an engrossing, slow-burning thriller of the very best kind: think Patricia Highsmith, rather than the pile-em-high Gone Girl-alikes. We meet our thoroughly unlikeable narrator Paul in a damp Charing Cross Road bookshop, where he bumps into an old university friend, and follow him as he wheedles his way first into a dinner invitation and then to a Greek island holiday. The genius of Lie With Me is in the way every piece fits together like a jigsaw puzzle: tiny details pass us by, as they do Paul, before finally we realise their significance at the end. And oh how perfect to read this while lying on a sun lounger on a Greek island myself. My favourite thriller of 2016 so far.

What Light
Jay Asher
Rating: **1/2
Sierra's parents own a Christmas tree farm and, as a result, she spends 11 months of the year on the farm in Oregon and the month of December on their Christmas tree lot in California. And her seventeenth Christmas in California may well be her last - as her parents are talking about closing the lot - so this is not the ideal time for her to fall for a local boy with a troubled past. What Light* is a fluffy, festive read but a long way from Asher's highly praised, gritty debut, Thirteen Reasons Why. Caleb and Sierra's romance is entirely PG and as saccharine sweet as the candy canes they're constantly stirring into hot chocolate.

Missing, Presumed
Susie Steiner
Rating: *****
I picked up Missing, Presumed in the library but didn't have particularly high hopes for it, so I was surprised to find myself completely absorbed and engaged within the first few pages. The first in a new series following police detective Manon Bradshaw, what I particularly liked was the combination of a police procedural with multi-character points of view, so that instead of seeing everything through Manon's (admittedly very interesting) eyes, the reader also 'hears' from the parents and best friend of the titular missing person, a co-worker of Manon's, etc. Also appealing to me - being a bleeding heart leftie - were the ways in which Steiner incorporated such issues as children in care, the Met's racist stop-and-search practices, and prison conditions, but with a light enough touch that the reader never feels preached at.

The Blood Card
Elly Griffiths
Rating: **1/2
I've always enjoyed Elly Griffiths books, although I'm baffled by the speed with which she cranks out both this Stephens & Mephisto series and the Ruth Galloway novels. The Blood Card* finds all the usual ingredients present and correct, most notably an atmospheric post-war Brighton setting combined with a fairly predictable but enjoyable plot. It just didn't get me turning the pages in the way I expect of a Griffiths novel.

* A digital copy of this book was kindly provided by the publishers for review via NetGalley.

What I've Been Reading Recently

As We Descended*
Robin Talley
Rating: ***
A diverse cast - including disabled, Latinx, Black, gay & lesbian characters - is one of the highlights of this clever re-telling of Macbeth set in a Southern boarding school. The setting, too, is well drawn: a venerable school on an old plantation, complete with misty & sinister lake, dusty locked rooms and abandoned passageways, and the terrible echoes of slavery and exploitation casting a Southern Gothic shadow over the place. There are some genuinely scary moments, too, most notably the opening chapter séance, which takes the place of the encounter with the three weird sisters and their predictions to Macbeth, and the later chapters in which Maria - our Macbeth - begins to unravel. As a Shakespeare geek, I thoroughly enjoyed the nods to the original play, both explicit - such as in the name of the prestigious school prize, Cawdor, for which Maria is fighting - or more subtle plot points.

The Last One*

Alexandra Oliva

Rating: ****

A group of people are sent off into the wilderness, cameras following discretely, to compete against each other in a Survivor-like reality TV show. Zoo, off on a solo challenge and starving and exhausted, is horrified at the lengths the TV production team have gone to scare her - fake rotting corpses, mechanised rabid animals - unaware that a cataclysmic virus has hit the east coast of America and that not only are these things not fake, but there are no cameras anymore, no production team. Instead, she's stuck in a race to survive that may never end. It's a brilliant premise, well executed, and while it doesn't maintain its initial promise right up to the end, it's a solid 3.5 stars from me, bumped up to 4 thanks to the ingenious idea behind it.

The Rift: A New Africa Breaks Free
Alex Perry
Rating: ***
I was immediately interested in reading this, by the former Time Magazine correspondent to Africa, as it seemed to offer a wide-ranging and Africa-focused look at the recent challenge and opportunities that the continent faces. However, despite an introduction in which Perry promised to offer Africans a voice in their own narrative, this is - largely - still a white Western man's view of Africa. There are exceptions - the chapters on China in Africa offer an interesting and enervating post-colonial view on investment in the continent, as too do his discussions with tech start-up entrepreneurs in Kenya and Nigeria - but I found this still too much about Western views of Africa rather than African views thereof.

American Housewife

Helen Ellis

Rating: ****

Short stories with enough bite to take your hand off, Ellis's collection is bleakly, bitterly funny. Particular highlights are a story about a failed novelist taking part in Dumpster Diving With The Stars, a reality TV pastiche that's all too familiar, and the surreal, insidiously sinister tale of a young woman's introduction to her - initially innocent-seeming - new book group.

The Trespasser*

Tana French

Rating: *
It breaks my heart to say this, because I have - to varying degrees - either very much liked or loved all of the previous books in the Dublin Murder Squad series, but my gosh The Trespasser was a terrible read. Where previous instalments have had real tension, great characterisation and brilliant scene-setting, this had a paper-thin plot which was easy to guess, and generally unlikeable characters. All in the series have been somewhat over-long and under-edited, but this read more like a novella or Kindle short padded out to 480 pages.

* I received a digital copy of this book from the publishers via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

What I've Been Reading Recently

I See You*
Clare Mackintosh
Rating: ****
Zoe is a harassed single mum commuting to a thankless clerical job in London, when one day she notices her photograph in a mysterious newspaper advert. The next day: same advert, different woman's photograph. Meanwhile, Kelly is a British Transport Police officer who (as is required by the genre) is troubled and in disgrace with her superiors. While we watch Zoe slowly unravel with the realisation that someone is watching her, Mackintosh does an excellent job of ramping up the tension as Kelly investigates a series of crimes seemingly related to the adverts. I especially enjoyed these chapters, which skewed more towards police procedural than psychological thriller. The author's experience in the police force shines through, making each character fully rounded and believable. As is generally the case with this brand of thriller, I found the ending required somewhat of a suspension of disbelief, but other than that Mackintosh has more than lived up to the promise of her gripping and prize-winning debut, I Let You Go.

The Loving Husband*
Christabel Kent
Rating: ***

Fran wakes up in her isolated Fens farmhouse to find her husband missing, his side of the bed empty. What follows is a tense thriller in which the reader if left, like Fran, not knowing who to trust. It's far from perfect - the police characters seem to come straight from bastard cop central casting, and the final denouement is rushed - but The Loving Husband cleverly toys with the reader, switching between past and present narratives and constantly wrong-footing you when you think you have it all figured out.

Am I Normal Yet?
How Hard Can Love Be? 
What's A Girl Gotta Do?
Holly Bourne
Rating: *****
Alex recommended that I read Holly Bourne's trilogy about three teenage girls navigating college, family, friendships, first love and feminism, and I'm really glad I gave them a try. The characters of Lottie, Amber and Evie are brilliantly obstreperous, totally loyal, and believable flawed, and this is YA with real heart and an explicitly feminist message. I spent the books willing them to come out of it all ok, whether 'it' was struggling with a relapse of OCD, working at an American summer camp while trying to come to terms with family issues, or dealing with online abuse and misogyny. How I wish I'd had books like these when I was a teen; instead, I'll have to content myself with pressing them upon every teenage girl of my acquaintance.

Thirteen Hours
7 Days
Cobra
Deon Meyer
Rating: ****
Originally written in Afrikaans and then translated into English, Meyer's Benny Griessel series has been rightly critically lauded around the world. Griessel, in the way of all brilliant detectives, is a troubled soul and an alcoholic, an old dog being forced to learn new tricks in a world of cyber crime and affirmative action, and the books are packed full of insights into modern, post-apartheid South Africa.  However, the Cape Town setting is one of the main attractions for me, rather like Edinburgh is for Rebus fans, and there's a real pleasure in following Griessel along streets I know so well. The British editions come with a handy glossary at the back, fairly essential for anyone less familiar with Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaans slang, but it's partly through this use of language that Meyer (and his brilliant translator) is able to communicate so much about the politics of the country. For example, there's a wonderful set-piece in 7 Days where an uppity police sergeant insists on speaking in Xhosa to a female Zulu detective; a subtle demonstration of the micro-aggressions a black woman still faces in the SAPS, while in Cobra the disappointments and corruption of the ANC government are put into a global context, with a British professor commenting of the multi-racial squad, "Well isn't this an advert for the Rainbow Nation."

Something New: Tales From A Makeshift Bride

Lucy Knisley

Rating: *****

Recommended to me by Laura, Something New - which follows the author's journey to a makeshift, homemade, entirely personal wedding - is one of the best graphic memoirs I've read. As Thomas and I are currently knee-deep in planning our own non-traditional, makeshift wedding the book felt very relevant, covering everything from international bridal traditions to the dreaded dress shopping and how she and her husband wrote their vows. Best of all were her reflections on bi-erasure and the unique tensions present when you are a queer feminist marrying a straight man, which really hit home for me. Accompanied by her beautifully inked drawings, this was an at times moving, at times amusing, always engrossing book.

* These books were kindly provided by the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Note: none of the links in this post are affiliate links.

What I've Been Reading Recently

Rivers Of London & Whispers Underground
Ben Aaronovitch
Rating: ***½ 
Being a fan of both urban fantasy and crime novels, I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to read Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers Of London series, but it took getting the books into stock at work to prod me into finally picking them up. They're far from perfect - at times the humour verges on the silly and puerile (I don't think, for instance, that the reader needs to always be told when Peter Grant, the protagonist, has an erection, and am also unsure why he apparently suffers from priapism more suited to a teenage boy), and they tread on some decidedly dodgy ground when it comes to race - but they're very readable, the combination of police procedural and magic being well handled and entertainingly written. 

Vinegar Girl
Anne Tyler
Rating: ***
Anne Tyler's take on the oft-adapted The Taming Of The Shrew is a fresh and witty approach to Shakespeare's classic comedy. Moving the action to suburban Baltimore (of course), her Kate is a cynical and unfulfilled young woman with a father trying to marry her off to his research assistant, so said assistant can get a green card. Avoiding the more unsavoury aspects of the original - most notably the wife beating - and replacing them with gentle family rom-com scenes makes Vinegar Girl* an enjoyable if not especially challenging read.

Modern Lovers
Emma Straub
Rating: ****
Modern Lovers* is a terrifically enjoyable comedy of manners set in Brooklyn following the fortunes of a group of friends from college who now find themselves with college-aged children of their own. Not a great deal happens, in the sense that nothing enormously dramatic occurs (well, apart from an arrest, a fire and a couple of breakdowns), but the characters are enormously engaging and I was very much invested in the journeys they all go on, separately and together. This would make a great beach read for anyone looking for smart, funny writing that's a cut above the usual summer bestsellers.

Life Moves Pretty Fast
Hadley Freeman
Rating: ****

Life Moves Pretty Fast is a collection of essays - always funny, often poignant - about the great teen movies of the 1980s: Dirty Dancing, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Pretty In Pink, etc. Subtitled 'The Lessons We Learned From Eighties Movies (And Why We Don't Learn Them From Movies Anymore)', each chapter looks at a different iconic film. From discussion with the stars, writers and directors, to personal anecdote, to looking at the changes to the Hollywood studio system that means such films couldn't be made now, Freeman dissects the movies that meant so much to her as a teen. My favourite chapter, predictably, was the one on Dirty Dancing, which focuses on the pro-choice message behind the film and ponders why abortion is a dirty word in mainstream movies today.

Scoot Over Skinny: The Fat Non-Fiction Anthology
ed. Donna Jarrell & Ira Sukrungruang
Rating: **

Oh, I had such high hopes for Scoot Over Skinny , which I picked up in a secondhand bookstore in Toronto last summer. An anthology of fat writers, writing about fat: it sounds great, right? Wrong. It started well and the first few essays, while not amazing, were pretty good. But then it went terribly wrong. The fat shame and fat hate included herein was depressing: there are pieces about bariatric surgery, about ‘hogging’ (a delightful practice wherein bros pick up, have sex with, and then shame fat women),  I suspect that actually many of the writers weren’t fat: David Sedaris is included, for one thing, and his piece about his sister, Amy, wearing a fat suit is just bizarre in its lack of relevance. The only thing that made me glad to read it was a superb essay by Sondra Solovay. “I cannot talk about fat politics without exploring race, sex, and other forms of discrimination…” she begins, before slaying with a completely on-point look at intersectionality and fat politics. I’ve made copies of this essay: the rest of the book will be swiftly donated.

The Woman In Cabin 10
Ruth Ware
Rating: **
I loved Ruth Ware's debut, In A Dark, Dark Wood, so had high hopes for The Woman In Cabin 10*. Unfortunately those high hopes weren't really met. Travel journalist Lo, traumatised by a violent break-in at home, leaps at the chance of reporting on the launch of a luxurious Scandinavian cruise. Stuck on the ship, with the wifi down ("teething problems"), the scene is set for a classic murder mystery. Sadly, despite the promising set-up, it all gets a bit overwrought and hysterical. Hinting at mental illness - a mention of past trauma here, a glimpse of medication there - has become a convenient short-cut to make your narrator both unreliable to the reader and to other characters, hence ramping up the tension as people refuse to believe what they say. Or so the theory goes, I suppose. Instead it comes across as lazy writing, and ableist to boot.

13 Minutes
Sarah Pinborough
Rating: ***½ 
13 Minutes* is an above-average psychological thriller for a YA audience which reminded me of Megan Abbott's books, if Abbott was from Lancashire instead of the USA. When Tasha, the most popular girl at school, is pulled from an icy river and revived, it begins a chain of events that lead to tragedy. Told through multiple first person narration - mainly Becca, Tasha's one-time best friend - but also Tasha herself, transcripts of counselling sessions, text messages and diary excerpts, the book slowly reveals its secrets, before pulling a bait-and-switch on the reader just when you think you have it all figured out.

The Fire Child
S K Tremayne
Rating: *
Warning, this review contains spoilers because this book is so bad I want to save you all from having to read it. As I said above in my review of The Woman In Cabin 10, I am seriously tired of lazy "is she mad/is it real?" plotting in psychological thrillers, and The Fire Child* has this in spades. The plot is ludicrous: woman is swept off her feet by a rich widow, marries him weeks later and is whisked to his palatial but past-its-best family home in an isolated valley in Cornwall. So far, so Du Maurier. Unfortunately, Tremayne is very much in the "tell, don't show" school of writing, so we are told that Rachel finds the house sinister, but not shown why that should be so. We're also told that she loves the house passionately (after a few weeks?) but again, not shown why. She constantly bangs on about wanting to 'heal' Jamie, her new stepson, but we're not shown any attempt from her to do so, apart from an ill-advised visit to a psychologist. As for her husband, events escalate ridiculously quickly - there's no sense of creeping menace, just BAM, he's a bad guy because we're told he is. All this and some shitty, lazy writing about poor areas of London (Rachel has 'escaped' from a 'terrible upbringing' being working class. It later transpires that some of it was pretty terrible, but the character talking about the escape doesn't know this at the time, it's literally just terrible because people wear high-vis vests and drink cheap larger). Truly, one of the worst books I've read in a while.

* These books were kindly provided by the publishers via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

What I've Been Reading Recently

The Museum Of You*
Carys Bray
Rating: *****
Clover, 12, is using her summer holidays to create a museum all about the mother she never knew. Meanwhile, her dad (Darren) is entirely focused on ensuring Clover is happy, even if that means suppressing his own grief, which is nevertheless manifested in his inability to throw anything away: it is from the hoarded mass of objects that fill their spare bedroom that Clover is gathering her exhibits. It seems counter-intuitive that a book steeped in grief, loss and guilt should be so filled with light and joy, but The Museum Of You is. Full of witty observations that demonstrate Bray's astute eye for the tiny yet important details of our lives, the malapropisms of Clover and Darren's next door neighbour are a particular delight; what might have felt trite and over-done in the hands of a less skilled author here made me laugh out loud. It's simply a delight to read: profound, moving, deeply sad and heartbreaking yet enormously uplifting. My book of the summer and quite possibly of 2016.

Between The World & Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Rating: *****

Toni Morrison called Between The World And Me, "essential reading" while a review on Kirkus said it, "might have been titled Black Lives Matter." Taking the form of a letter from Coates to his teenage son, it's both a memoir and a meditation on the history of American state violence against black bodies. A tough but important read, Between The World And Me is an impassioned and rightfully angry book, pervaded with a sense of his fear for his son, a young black man in a country where young black men are feared, incarcerated, violated, killed.

When Breath Becomes Air*
Paul Kalanithi
Rating: ****
When Breath Becomes Air is the memoir of neuro-surgeon Paul Kalanithi who, months before finally qualifying and after a glittering academic career that included a first degree in English Literature from Stanford, to a Masters at Cambridge followed by a medical degree at Yale, was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. It's a quick read but enormously moving, with Kalanithi writing fluently and beautifully about living and dying. He is concerned, mostly, with mortality: first that of his patients, and then his own. And the afterword, by his wife Lucy, left me a weeping, sobbing mess on the Eurostar, to the confusion of other passengers.

Murder Most Unladylike
Robin Stevens
Rating: ****
Take a pinch of Enid Blyton's Malory Towers books, add a dash of Agatha Christie, take away the egregious racism of both, and you have the Murder Most Unladylike series. Our heroines are schoolgirls Daisy Wells (who fancies herself as Sherlock Holmes, emotional detachment and all) and Hazel Wong, daughter of an Anglophile Chinese businessman. When Hazel stumbles upon the body of a teacher at Deepdean, their boarding school - a body which, the alarm having been raised, mysteriously disappears - the game is afoot and the girls get to detecting. Further books so far in the series find them working to solve murders at Daisy's family home (a huge country pile, naturally), on the Orient Express, and then back at Deepdean. These are the book equivalent of curling up under a blanket with a hot chocolate on a cold day: deeply comforting and satisfying.

Dear Amy*
Helen Callaghan
Rating: ***
Dear Amy borrows heavily from others of the psychological thriller genre, but crafts that which is borrowed into something new and unique. The trope of the unreliable narrator, used to great effect in The Girl On The Train, at first seemed a bit tired, but a few plot twists later and the fact that we can't trust protagonist Margot's perception of events becomes more exciting. As often happens with psychological thrillers, there are quite a few moments when I was shouting at the page. "What are you doing?!" but there's a kind of logic to Margot's actions that is often lacking in other narratives. And the autumnal Cambridge setting adds enormously to the atmosphere of the book, providing a creeping sense of unease amongst the dreaming spires.

Midnight Crossroad
Charlaine Harris
Rating: ****
When internet psychic Manfred Bernado moves to the sleepy town of Midnight, Texas, he quickly learns that all is not as it seems with the inhabitants (as you would expect from a book by the author of the True Blood books). I can't say much more about the Midnight Crossroad series, which so far consists of three books, without giving away plot spoilers. Suffice it to say that I loved the books and fell head over heels with Midnight and those who live there. If you enjoy gentle human drama with a touch of the supernatural, I'm confident you'll enjoy them too.

Excluded
Julia Serano
Rating: ****
Sub-titled 'Making Feminist & Queer Movements More Inclusive', Excluded is a riposte to all the trans-exclusionary radical 'feminists' out there who seek to exclude, endanger and dehumanise trans women. Serano is an evolutionary biologist, so the chapters dealing with the science of gender are particularly strong and have given me plenty of ammunition for debate. She also has a lot to say about bi-phobia and femme-phobia within queer communities, which as a femme, bi-identified queer woman resonated with me.

Girls Will Be Girls
Emer O'Toole
Rating: ***
Through a mixture of memoir and academic analysis, O'Toole looks at how women perform, and are expected to perform, gender. Much of what she has to say will be familiar to anyone who's read more widely on gender, feminist theory and sociology, but she has a way with words that makes the journey enjoyable and worthwhile, nevertheless. However, it was interesting to read Girls Will Be Girls immediately after Excluded because it brought home to me how poor O'Toole is on intersectionality, and particularly trans issues. While she tries to talk generally about women, she is almost always focused on her own personal experience as a white, cis, able-bodied woman. Admittedly, Girls Will Be Girls is very explicitly rooted in the personal, and anecdotes about her own experiences form the basis of the book. However, to fail to recognise her privilege or to at least admit, "hey, not every woman is like me," just isn't good enough in 2016.

* These books were kindly provided by the publishers, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

What I've Been Reading Recently

Eligible*
Curtis Sittenfeld
Rating: *****
I'm really not exaggerating when I say I've been looking forward to the release of Eligible for years. Ever since the Austen Project launched with the news that one of my favourite authors, Curtis Sittenfeld would be taking on Jane's most-loved book, to be exact. So expectations were high, although adjusted somewhat after I hated Alexander McCall Smith's Emma so much that I couldn't even finish it. It took me a good few chapters to get into the rhythm of the novel, and especially to get to know the 'new' Lizzie, but once I had I loved it. Relocating the action from rural 19th century England to 21st century Cincinnati works remarkably well, with Mrs Bennet's transformation into a shopping addicted, casually racist lady-who-lunches being particularly well done. I flew through the short, snappy chapters with a grin on my face, delighted at the smart, witty dialogue, the small touches harking back the original novel, and the clever ways in which Sittenfeld has updated others. A wonderful read, and one I am sure I will return to.

The Kind Worth Killing
Peter Swanson
Rating: ****
The Kind Worth Killing is a superior psychological thriller, much recommended if you enjoyed the plot twists and amoral characters in Gone Girl.

You Know Me Well*
David Levithan & Nina LaCour
Rating: ****
I love David Levithan's work when he's writing with someone else - Nick & Norah's Infinie Playlist and Dash & Lily's Book Of Dares (both with Rachel Cohn) are two of my favourite YA novels - and You Know Me Well doesn't buck the trend. The book follows Mark and Kate, seniors at the same high school who bump into each other at random on a night out in San Francisco (a night which, for various reasons, doesn't go too well for either of them). Kate's storyline perfectly evoked that teenage feeling of growing apart from friends who used to be your whole world, while Mark's deals with the pain of unrequited love. I loved that both characters, and their friends, were portrayed flaws and all. Kate makes decisions that not only seem irrational but that hurt others, while Mark's best friend breaks his heart by not reciprocating his feelings, but we never judge them because we've all been there. It was especially enjoyable to read a contemporary YA novel which is much more about friendship than it is about romance.

Since You've Been Gone
Morgan Matson
Rating: ***
Since You've Been Gone was a surprisingly enjoyable novel set over the course of a summer. Essentially not a great deal happens - Emily's best friend moves away, leaving her with a list of challenges to complete, which she does with the help of the usual motley band of strangers - but I liked it a lot, nevertheless.

London Belongs To Us*
Sarra Manning
Rating: ***
I was so excited to read this book because I adore Sarra Manning and particularly loved her previous YA novel, Adorkable. In London Belongs To Us we meet Sunny, an engaging and sympathetic heroine who's seeking either revenge on or reconciliation with - she's not quite sure - her boyfriend after she sees a picture of him kissing another girl. We follow her on a madcap twelve hour race across London from Crystal Palace to Alexandra Palace, via Camden, Shoreditch, Dalston, Soho, Chelsea and Notting Hill, during which time she outwits a group of thugs, steals a bike, becomes an internet sensation, meets the terrifying Jeanne (fans of Adorkable will cheer), crashes a house party, and much more. I wanted very badly to love this book but didn't, perhaps because I read it hot on the heels of Since You've Been Gone, with which is shares some superficial characteristics (meek and well-behaved girl learns how to cut loose). That being said, the portrayal of London clearly bespeaks of Manning's huge love for her city, and the supporting characters, especially the posh private school kids - with shades of Made In Chelsea - are enormous fun.

Golden Boy
Abigail Tarttelin
Rating: ***
Golden Boy is a sensitive, if not always entirely believable, look at the life of an Intersex teenager. It made compelling reading and I enjoyed it a lot, but the chapters were notably stronger when narrated by Max, the 'Golden Boy' of the title, while those from an adult PoV were less convincing.

The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August
Claire North
Rating: ***
Thomas has been telling me for months that I needed to read The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August and I finally capitulated. This was the second time-bendy, multiple-life science fiction books I've read recently (with the first being Bone Clocks), and I found it an easier yet less satisfying read than David Mitchell's book.

* These books were kindly provided by the publishers via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.