Top six reads in the first six months of 2021
A bookish spot at the restaurant Brac n Bow in Featherston Booktown
This took some serious discipline, but I have cheated slightly and given a further six books honourable mention for the period from January to July 2021. As you can probably tell from this list I am entirely unfaithful to any one genre. Typically, I also enjoy everything from middle grade to adult fiction, but so far this year, no middle grade or YA books have risen to the top of my list! I’d love to know if you’ve read any of these or if there’s anything that you think should be on the reading list for the rest of the year.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
This was my first Shirley Jackson and certainly won’t be my last. It’s a sort of subversive I Capture the Castle with arsenic in the sugar bowl and death cap mushrooms in the tea. The opening paragraph is a strong contender for my favourite opening paragraph of all time;
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the middle two fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita Phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
Merricat and Constance still live in their gentile and crumbling family home separated from the local village by a locked gate and a stretch of woodland. Mistrusted and seen as outsiders, the villagers treat them with suspicion, especially around the death of their immediate family. When a cousin starts to sniff around Constance, it seems that Merricat’s carefully boundaried life may be picked apart, but ever-devoted to her sister, Merricat has to think of a way to drive him out. Completely compelling and strangely tender in its telling, this twisted little tale is one that that I’m sure I will return to.
Gilead By Marilynne Robinson
This book was a lovely way to start the year. The Reverend John Ames has a heart condition and having married late in life, he has a young son in his seventies. Knowing that he won’t survive to see his son grow up, he sits down to write him a long letter and it’s this letter to his son that makes up this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. John reveals his heart and soul on the page charting his own childhood, family history, his love for his wife and his hopes for his son. He is open about his struggles to be kind towards Jack, the “prodigal son” of a preacher friend, and to relate to the religious fervour of his grandfather who was also a clergyman. It is testament to the beauty of Marilynne Robinson’s writing that a novel with little structure or plot made me long for a quiet evening to sit down with John Ames again. Full of grace and the beauty of the everyday, it is the ordinariness of John’s life that makes this relatable, but his rich inner life that makes it sublime.
The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by CM Waggoner
This is an adult historical fantasy adventure with a central sapphic romance and a dashing turn of phrase. Dellaria Wells is a fire witch and one who is struggling to make ends meet. Having grown up in the tenements of Leiscourt, Delly is used to fending for herself, especially when her addict Ma is back on the drip. When she sees an advert for female bodyguards “of magical or martial ability” to guard a young lady of standing in the run-up to her wedding, Delly finds herself joining a company of women of astonishing and assorted talents. Set in an alternative Victorian universe of trolls, necromancers and witches, this book was a sheer delight for being unapologetically different. Even the chapter headings were humorous, “Wherein Things Go to Hell and Come to Light.” Waggoner plays with language giving Delly a unique voice and whilst that won’t be to everyone’s tastes, I loved it.
The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden
A classic coming of age story with a touch of mystery set at the height of a French summer in the 1920’s. Mam is exasperated by the selfishness of her five children and resolves to take them all to France to see the WWI graves, so they understand the sacrifice of others. The only issue is that Mam is bitten by a horsefly on the journey over and by the time they arrive at the town of Vieux-Mouiters, she is very ill and is hospitalised leaving the children to stay at their hotel, Les Oeillets, alone with no family and little oversight. That is, until Eliot, a charming Englishman takes them under his wing. As the greengages ripen and then rot in the hotel’s orchard, Jos and Cecil, the two oldest girls, learn about the fallibility of the adults around them. Apparently based on a read experience from Godden’s life, this is a truly transportive novel. You can almost taste the girls’ first sip of champagne, the grenadine sirop and strawberry ices at the plage. I wanted to stroll over the bridge to the cafe in the town square with the honey-walled monastery perched on the hill above the river. But, most of all, Godden captures that strange in-between state of the transition from child to adulthood and the sense of loss that can accompany it. Brilliant and beautiful.
The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper
Set in Ancient Rome in the town of Pompeii in AD74, this is the story of the town brothel, called The Wolf Den, and the enslaved women who work there. Each chapter opens with a translated piece of town graffiti that gives a very real sense of life in this busy river port. The central character is Amara. Daughter of a Greek doctor, she is sold into slavery and then sent to the brothel in Pompeii alongside Dido from Carthage, Beronice from Egypt and Victoria who was rescued from the town dump as a baby. Although this is story of survival with each of the women desperate to find a way out of The Wolf Den, the overwhelming sense that remained with me after finishing the book was one of true female comradeship. We walk with them as they parade around the forum, call into The Sparrow for hot wine and go “fishing” for customers on the wharf. I found the small historical details fascinating, and the author brought the town of Pompeii, both its quiet colonnaded courtyards and its muddy streets, from something that was abstract to a living and breathing entity. The Wolf Den is set to become a trilogy and I will be front of the queue for the next installment!
The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins
Set in the late 18th and early 19th century, Frannie starts her life as a slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation. Taught to read as the result of a bet, Frannie soon becomes indispensable to the plantation owner, John Langton, and his despicable pseudo-scientific experiments about the origins of skin colour and race. When the stable where these experiments occur burns down, Frannie sails to London where John gives her to George and Marguerite Benham as a domestic servant. George Benham considers himself a man of science and John wishes to curry favour with him, but its to Marguerite that Frannie is drawn. The home is an unhappy one with a thin veneer of civility. When both of the Benhams are found murdered one night, Frannie finds herself accused and facing trial. There is a sense of a clear-eyed and unwavering gaze in the writing here that reminded me a little of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It is not an easy read in places, but nor is it meant to be.
Honourable mentions also go to;
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr
The Emperor’s Babe by Bernadine Evaristo
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff