I thought I’d highlight a few things I’ve been reading recently. Here are a handful of excellent novels I’ve read so far this year – nonfiction may or may not follow in another post!
Firekeeper’s Daughter, Angeline Boulley
A young woman tries to understand her community and her family, and gets involved in an undercover police operation as part of that process. This is a great story with some really interesting and nuanced reflections on what it means to be part of a community, or more than one community, and what options you have when tragedy seems to be endemic. I found the violence genuinely upsetting – an important feature of this sort of writing, even if I can’t really call it ‘enjoyable’ – and also appreciated the way in which teenaged characters are able to share with the reader their growing insights into the structures, often unjust structures, which shape their world.
A different set of questions about how far you would go to challenge society and build your own life. Where the main character in Firekeeper’s Daughter moves towards her community to try and understand it, the characters here end up moving away from their communities, but not before a good deal of struggle with the assumptions people make. I enjoyed the way the two main characters come to rely on each other, and – although I don’t want to give away spoilers – the ending.
Acts of Love and War, Maggie Brooks
Lucy goes out to Spain during the Civil War, intending both to help the Quaker relief efforts there and to bring home two young men she grew up with. The effort to persuade them not to see non-partisan views of the situation or to change their minds is mostly futile, but their letters provide a lot of the contextual information about the war; if anything, Lucy changes her perspective as she sees more of the situation. She discovers the satisfactions as well as the challenges of supporting refugees and orphans, and becomes much less dependent on her relationships with men. For fans of historical fiction, this is closely based on academic research, and accurate as well as engaging.
The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan Twan Eng
This story is both beautiful and heartbreaking. It explores how a traumatic experience (being in a prisoner of war camp) changed the whole shape of a woman’s life, including directing her to a particular career and to a fascination with gardens. Having been imprisoned by Japanese soldiers, but wanting to learn to create Japanese gardens, Yun Ling has a deeply complex relationship with Japanese culture, and hence with the Japanese gardener with whom she studies. I don’t have very much patience left for fiction which explores the legacy of the Second World War, especially if it’s clumsy, so believe me when I say that this is the very opposite: beautifully and thoughtfully shaped, like the gardens it describes, with a real focus on the effects on the victims of war.
Ember of a New World, Ishtar Watson
Ember has only just come of age when she is suddenly given a mission to travel as far through her world – Mesolithic or just pre-Neolithic Europe – as she can. She sets off alone to explore, and along the way introduces the reader to different hunting and farming methods, cultures and languages, and dangers (some natural, but mostly human). Ishtar includes non-fiction sections at the beginning of each chapter so that you can see how each section is based on research, which adds depth, and although this isn’t a romance story, there’s also a charming plot line in which Ember begins to fall in love.
Have you read any of these? What have you been reading?
Rhiannon Grant 