I am about to review a World War II book in which the lesbians survive. If knowing which characters survive is a spoiler that would taint your enjoyment of a book, now would be a good time to stop reading this post. Ordinarily I would start by saying the name of the book and talking about its other qualities and eventually, with spoiler tags, I would add that the lesbians survive. But honestly, in this, the darkest timeline, the lesbians surviving is a big part of what made the book so meaningful to me, and I thought I would probably…
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My concerns going into The Watchmaker of Filigree Street were, one, that it would be too twee, and two, that I didn’t care much about solving a mysterious bombing at Victorian Scotland Yard by Irish freedom fighters. Happily for my peace of mind, though it starts off seeming like a rather twee mystery about a bombing at Victorian Scotland yard by Irish freedom fighters, that really isn’t what the book is at all. Our hero, Thaniel Steepleton, comes home from a difficult day at the telegraph office (bomb threat, something something) to find that his flat has been broken into,…
14 CommentsHow Freedom and Necessity was described to me by Anastasia: An epistolary novel set in Victorian times, with magic! What I pictured: Sorcery and Cecelia The primary topic of the first forty pages of Freedom and Necessity: Hegel, I swear to God. You know, the philosopher. And his concepts of idealism. So, yeah. Me and Freedom and Necessity got off to a bumpy start. Luckily, I was on the bus and had nothing else of interest for my eyes to rest on for the duration of the bus ride, which meant that perforce I read past the first 40 pages…
17 CommentsAt last I have read something by Andrea Levy! I have been meaning to do so for many moons now, and when my book club decided to go with Angela Carter instead of Andrea Levy for next month, I trotted round to the library and got The Long Song. I wanted Small Island but it turned out I couldn’t be bothered climbing all the way up the stairs to the second floor where they keep the non-new fiction. (I know Long Song came out in 2010. Don’t ask me to explain the new/not new classification system of the New York…
19 CommentsAnd magical realism rears its ugly — no, I’m kidding. The Oracle of Stamboul has the tiniest ever amount of magical realism, actually the perfect amount. At the start of the story, when our protagonist Eleonora is about to be born, the author mentions a flock of hoopoes (they look like this, if you’re curious) that comes to settle near her house on the night of her birth. After that, I was on red alert, as my displeasure with an excess of magical realism is rapid and permanent. But first-time author Michael David Lukas has a light touch with the…
27 CommentsI recently ranked the colonizing countries of the West in order of how much I like to read about their colonizing ways, and Britain came in first place. And if I had ranked British-colonized countries in order of how much I like to read about their colonized ways — well, I’d never have done that, because it would always be changing — but if I did do it, India would be at the top. I long and long and long to go to India. Someday I will go, and I think it will be amazing (but hot). The Siege of…
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