thebacklistborrower's reviews
538 reviews

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

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emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Another book where I just don’t know where to start. I got the paperback in a book swap, but in a twist of fate, I decided it would maybe be better to listen to. There are only a few books where I specifically recommend the audiobook over a hard copy, and this is one of them. The women written by Bernadine Evaristo are fully brought to life through their language, accents, and vocal style in the narration done by Anna-Maria Nabirye. 

A collection of stories about the lives of 12 Black British women, the concepts of identity, race, gender, class, and sexuality are explored thoroughly through a myriad of intersectional viewpoints. The characters are loosely connected through school, work, family connections, relationships, and happenstance, but no two share more than their gender and race, leading to a deep, complex portrayal of life in Britain for Black women. However, that being said, the stories, trials, and lives of these women will have universal appeal. 

Partway through my read, I googled this book and found it co-won the Booker with the completely mediocre “The Testaments” by Margaret Atwood in 2019, an astonishing slight. So much of this book is about the struggles faced by women, and especially women of colour for academic, societal, business, and artistic recognition in broader society. The book is bookended by the story of Amma who, after decades in theatre, is opening a play she wrote in a mainstream theatre for the first time. And that’s just one example. For the judges to miss this point so fully that they gave the award in part to a mainstream white female author for an unimaginative, unremarkable sequel is painful.

While Girl, Woman, Other captures pain, it also captures joy. It walks a balance: tipping into sorrow before tripping into love. No matter your class, gender or sexual identity, race, religion, immigration status, or family makeup, you will find yourself in this book, and find others too. This book is universal. If you’re looking for a book to read this summer, this is it. 

 
Unless by Carol Shields

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emotional funny reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? N/A
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

You won’t see many of my favourite books on Bookstagram because I just don’t know how to write reviews of them. How do I tell others that this book changed my life without sounding trite? So all my favourite books -- Tamora Pierce, In the Slender Margin, Unless -- all are missing from this feed. Until today! I’ve already spoken about my experience uncovering the women’s rage in Unless, but never a review. 

Unless is the story of Reta Winters, a writer of “women’s fiction”, who seemed to live a perfect life, until her daughter Norah quits college to live on a Toronto street corner with only a sign that says “Goodness”. The book is Reta’s internal monologue as she deals with the trials of her life, as a woman, as a writer, as a woman writer of women’s fiction, and struggling to figure out what to do about Norah.

Page by page, this book had feelings and scenes that I have never read in a book before. I copied out full pages of quotes of Norah’s reflections on sexism, and male privilege, and her own rage at the world that denigrates her and her work. What I found most interesting was the ongoing thread of figuring out what happened to Norah. All of Reta’s friends and family had their own theories, projected from their own insecurities, and the reader is invited to consider the same-- what would make you give up your life?

Secondly, Reta’s denigration as a “woman writer writing about a woman who writes” was not taken lightly. While she stays silent, the book is full of internal monologue that shouts “SHUT UP! SHUT UP!” at a misogynist male reviewer she meets for coffee, sarcastic, mean comments that she only wishes to speak aloud, and looks that any woman knows how to make but few men know how to see. I saw myself in this book, and I think many women would. 

I think this was the second book I read this year. It has not been surpassed by any other book, and I don’t expect it to be. If you’re looking for a sharp, interesting, feminist read, you won’t go wrong with Unless.
Ink Earl by Susan Holbrook

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funny lighthearted

5.0

Smudge resistant and easy to maneuver, Paper Mate® Pink Pearl® Erasers are the perfect partner for your writing.
  • 100% latex-free and smudge-resistant eraser to keep your pages fresh
  • Clean finish is perfect for exams, essays, and everyday writing -- a trusted choice for standardized tests
  • Sharp corners and flat face help you erase both details and large areas
  • Classic design is ideal for everyone from students to serious artists
~~~~~~
kalE 100% fresh hel
In frames p**n is Classi
Beans for everyone from students to serious artists
I lean in for her corners and dents

And those are only a few examples of the hilarious, touching, thoughtful, and absurd erasure poems in Ink Earl, by Susan Holbrook, published by @coachhousebooks. I bought this book last April and for some reason never reviewed it! In Ink Earl, Hobrook takes ad copy for the classic Pink Pearl eraser, and writes “100 essays” by erasing and erasing and erasing. 

This was a super enjoyable book of poetic “essays”. Split up into different sections: love, the world, writing, food, art, family, music, health, nature, and thinkers, there are thoughts and jokes on a surprising range of topics. 

Its a perfect little read if you need some absurdity and play in your poetry.

 
The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 45%.
I've tried to read it like three times now and just can't get interested or excited in it. 
Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 34%.
Totally unengaging for me. A third in and I still don't care. 
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

I thought I was the last person who hadn’t read this book when it was shortlisted, but I’m glad I didn’t read it any sooner. It was an emotionally draining read, taking me back to the very early days of the pandemic, and three years was a good amount of space for me.

The book follows a loosely connected cast of characters, seeing their experience through the earliest days of their pandemic, and their stories of survival through to Year 15 and beyond. I thought it was excellent. Some scenes will haunt me for a very long time, and while much of the early pandemic scenes are loosely transferable to our own, their flu truly took them to apocalypse, and I thought much of the book was not anything like our world now.

Does this book help shift perspectives? I’m going to argue that this book isn’t actually that transferable, even though we are in the aftermath of a pandemic like those in Station Eleven. *SPOILERS* This is because in this book, the virus is extremely virulent, people die in a day or two, and the fatality rate is 99%. The characters in Station Eleven are truly *post*-pandemic, in that there is no reference to it persisting in the world among the few survivors. The challenges we have now becoming accustomed to an endemic disease that is still dangerous to many members of the public just don’t show.

Also, another major challenge we have is misinformation related to the disease, and a group of society that believes it is fake, and wearing masks is a threat to freedom. This also has no bearing in Station Eleven, where the internet does not exist. The closest comparison is the book following one cult that formed, but that’s resolved by literally killing the leader. Obviously that’s not a transferable solution to our world. 
So did I love Station Eleven? Yes, and I’d happily recommend it to everybody who likes a human-centred sci-fi book. But I don’t think it will help shift perspectives on the challenges we are experiencing now in our endemic world. 
Chrysalis by Anuja Varghese

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? N/A

4.0

Happy Pub Day to this short story collection by debut Author Anuja Vargehese.

I got this book as part of my Anansi subscription last year and was very interested by the synopsis that bills the book as genre-bending, with tales that explore transformation and belonging, community, sexuality, and expectations.

The epigraph of this book reads “This book is for all the girls and women who don’t see themselves in most stories. You are worthy of reflection, despite what you have been told,” setting a powerful stage for the remainder of the book.

The short stories are mostly all on the shorter side, only a few pages in some cases, and they certainly blur the lines of genre. These fast-paced tales with such interesting combinations of characters and tropes had me devouring large parts of the book in single sittings, something I’ve struggled to do lately.

Any time a new story started, I had no idea what I was going to find. Some stories were pure literary fiction, and others had elements of magical realism. Chitra (Or: A Meteor Hit the Mall and Chitra Danced in the Flames) is a retelling of a European fairy tale, and one is horror, through and through. My favourite stories were Milk, Stories in the Language of the Fist, A Cure for Fear of Screaming, and Midnight at the Oasis, which run the gamut of genre. Each of these made me slow down and spend more time with them, and savour them. 

If you are a fan of short stories, or looking for something with a lot of diversity, or you like more unusual fiction that is weird in a very good way, be sure to check out Chrysalis. 
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Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

When I asked my followers to pump me up for this book, I didn’t necessarily get what I asked for. But, in the end, I found this book was much better than some had lead me to believe (although, in one case, the reader had specifically disliked the narrator). 

I’m not much of a horror reader, and I had seen A LOT of mixed reviews of this book, so I was surprised to see it in Canada Reads. Despite a very slow start, I ended up having to read most of the book in two days to get it back to my library, and I was surprised to find that it was actually a fairly easy feat!

We follow Noemi to a rural English estate in the Mexican mountains, after her cousin, recently married to one of the inhabitants, sends an unhinged letter. Once there, Noemi struggles to uncover what is happening to her cousin, while navigating a tight-lipped and racist English family. The book certainly had spooky elements, and lives up to its gothic name.

While being far outside what I normally read, I ended up mostly liking Mexican Gothic. It was hard to read with so much baggage going in, and I wonder if I would have liked it even more without being hyper aware of some of the plot elements. I knew, for example, that fungi played a big part of the story as EVERY review references it, so rather than subtle foreshadowing, the many, MANY references to fungi leading into the exposition of that plot point felt like getting beat around the head with a fungus. 

I think I would maybe recommend this book for a beach read as I did enjoy it in the end. While it does have some deeper elements, and rather obvious allegories to colonialism, I personally didn’t find it thought-provoking or very stimulating (beyond the spookyness, that is). But, as always, if it sounds good, go for it! Many people absolutely love it!
Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory by Sarah Polley

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 8%.
probably just a "not-right-now", but it was very dark and I just couldn't handle it.
City of Thieves by David Benioff

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adventurous dark emotional funny lighthearted sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

At my book club, the book was described as “buoyantly desperate”, and we all agreed that that was a very apt description.

City of Thieves takes place during the Siege of Leningrad during WW2, and is about the Quixotic journey of Lev Benioff, a teenaged jewish russian boy, and the bombastic soldier Kolya. After each being picked up separately by the police and threatened with death, they are instead asked to find a dozen eggs for the Colonel’s daughter’s wedding cake. This starts them on an odyssey through the streets of the war-torn Leningrad and beyond, crossing paths with ordinary criminals, Germans, cannibals, and spies.

We all really liked this book. We had read The Orphanage not too long ago, and certainly found similarities, but the tones of each were very different. While Lev had a tendency to despair (perfectly reasonable), Kolya kept not only Lev looking on the brightside, but the readers too. He had this personality that him just farther than reasonable, but never really got him into trouble (somehow). We also enjoyed the deeply boyish perspective of the books, and thought it well done. Both characters are under 20, and their talk ranged from war to food, and of course, to girls and sex, but nobody in the book club thought it toxic or unpleasant to read. All the girls and women in the book are treated with respect, which I think is how it balanced well.

Beyond books, David Benioff has written for Marvel and Game of Thrones, and this screenwriting background explained why the book is very theatrical. I often felt like I could see the scenes as they happened, for better or worse. This was an enjoyable read for all, but if you know people who might find reading “boring” this book would be a good recommendation for them with the theatrical language and the pacing, action, excitement, and adventure.