Women sticking together: 1920s England, 1970s America and modern Japan

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Reflecting on translating Asako Yuzuki’s novel Hooked from Japanese into English, Polly Barton writes about the problem she had with one word used ‘for female friendship within it: the description by multiple characters of female friendships or groups of women as doro-doro… An online dictionary I use offers “gooey”, “gungy”, “gunky”… “thick”, “slime” and then also “destructive”‘. Another word, necchori, which means something like ‘involved female relationships’, also has that sense of being ‘sticky’. Although Barton has to resort to a number of different English alternatives to get this across in Hooked, she succeeds: the central female relationship in this book definitely feels ‘sticky’. Single Eriko is successful at work in present-day Tokyo but becomes obsessed with a blog written by ‘the worst wife ever’, Shoko, a stay-at-home housewife who has little time for her chores. I expected a slow-burn breakdown of the friendship between these two women, but instead, early in the novel, Shoko thinks she’s clocked Eriko: she’s weirdly intense, far too set on making Shoko into her perfect best friend. Despite Shoko’s decision to cut Eriko off, she’s now stuck with her, and their new, forced closeness even begins to try Eriko’s patience.

Hooked is firmly about platonic relationships between women: though Eriko and Shoko are occasionally mocked as ‘lezzers’ [no idea what that looks like in the original Japanese], they’re both desperately seeking the ideal of female friendship held up to them by the media. In contrast, the women who stick together in Avery Curran’s debut Spoiled Milk and Alice Martin’s debut Westward Women run the gamut from queer-coded to explicitly sapphic. Spoiled Milk is set in a girls’ boarding school in England in 1928 afflicted by a succession of deaths; our heroines, who are pretty much all lesbians, decide that the only way to figure out what is going on is to summon the first victim, Violet, via a seance. As they try to get Violet to manifest fully as an ectoplasmic apparition via her possession of one of the girls, things get literally sticky: ‘There was something there, emerging from her gullet… It became more and more solid, like a twist of cheesecloth dripping with something viscous and faintly pearlescent.’ The web of romantic connections between the girls intensifies as they realise they are trapped in the school. On the other hand, in Westward Women, a budding romance between two women is cut short when one of them decides she doesn’t want to stick with her new lover. She’s already fled one life, and she can’t go back: ‘Thinking of that day now, all [she] could remember was feeling sticky.’

A physical manifestation at a seance in 1908, depicted in The Tatler. Source: British Newspaper Archive blog.

This twist in Westward Women is unexpected. Set in the United States in 1973, the novel explores an alternate version of history where young women start experiencing a mysterious itch that compels them to travel westward across the country towards the Pacific Ocean. Although they leave one by one, it becomes clear (disappointingly, in my opinion) that this is no weird radical vision of female futures. The infected women are vulnerable to male violence when they become ‘too sick to stick together’, and Westward Women devolves into a cliched thriller. Nevertheless, I was interested by Martin’s decision to split up several pairs of women – friends as well as lovers – at the end of the novel, leaving them to discover their destinies alone. In contrast, Spoiled Milk ends with two of the ex-schoolgirls still stuck together by the horrific events they experienced; maybe they’re in love, but maybe they’re just sharing trauma.

Of these three novels, Hooked stands out as the most distinctive and also the most painful read (even if it’s not as good as Yuzuki’s later novel Butter). It can feel vicious at times, suggesting that women are unable to form true connections because, like the Nile perch that ate up all the other fish when it was introduced to Lake Victoria, they are constantly in competition. Nevertheless, I think Yuzuki is saying something about the specific struggles that Eriko and Shoko face rather than generalising about women as a whole: the pair constantly encounter groups of female friends of different ages who appear perfectly happy together, underlining their joint failure to make such connections. By the end of the novel, both women have realised they were projecting their own insecurities, and while they are no longer in physical contact, they are still stuck together mentally – neither of them’s going to stop thinking about the other any time soon.

What makes the relationships in these novels move from being uncomfortably sticky to positively charged? Although I had mixed feelings about all three books (you can read my fuller thoughts on Spoiled Milk here and Westward Women here), I was happy that none of them offer up clear answers. In Westward Women, solidarity between women is important, but sometimes you still need to run from a best friend or a female lover. Spoiled Milk plays with stereotypes of public schoolgirls as unhealthily stuck together, plagued with ‘pashes’ and crushes, but ultimately its protagonist finds redemption by growing closer to another girl, not further apart. Even in Hooked, Eriko is finally able to step back and wonder if the connection she so desperately pursued is what she really wants. Fiction of this kind often portrays women’s bonds as superior to heterosexual love, but there is a cost to choosing to stick rather than twist, and all these novels recognise it.

Source: Curran and Martin from NetGalley; Yuzuki bought in paperback from Waterstones.

People who suffer: To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage

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Spoilers for To The Moon and Back follow. I’ve spoiler tagged the Goodreads version of this review.

Warning: very long and (semi-)ranty

Before picking up Eliana Ramage’s debut novel To The Moon and Back, I noticed one common thread in the reviews I was reading. Steph, our lesbian Cherokee protagonist who dreams only of being an astronaut, is difficult. A lot of readers found her unlikeable, while others were more willing to give her the benefit of the doubt but still noted that she needed to learn how to balance her personal ambition and her emotional ties. Having now read the novel, however… I agree that Steph is a problem, but not the kind of problem I thought she might be. It’s less that Steph is hard to like than that To The Moon And Back goes out of its way to make it hard for us to like Steph, and this drags at the heels of everything else this story wants to do.

For me, To The Moon And Back was an engrossingly painful reading experience because of the way Steph is treated by the narrative. From the start of the novel, she’s framed as self-centred and monomaniacal, but until the fifty percent mark, there’s very little that bears this out. Steph tells us she’s a bad person and other people tell us she’s a bad person, but I found little in her behaviour to fault. The worst thing she does in this part of her life is probably not turning up at the hospital when her sister Kayla’s giving birth to her first child, but she both helps out with childcare and financially supports her sister when her niece is born.

At the same time, the list of wrongs done to Steph is extensive. Kayla makes it clear that she doesn’t support her when they are both only teenagers, an attitude that persists into their adult lives. ‘Sometimes it’s just like, we get it? You know a lot of shit about space!’ Kayla mocks her sister to a boy she fancies. When Steph applies to the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, she’s desperate to get in, but later discovers her mother hid the letter from her that informed her she’d won a full scholarship, so she isn’t able to attend. (I actually liked the characterisation of Steph’s mother Hannah and respected how difficult this situation must have been for her, given the Cherokee history of child removal and Hannah’s desire for Steph to remain connected to her ancestral roots, rather than heading off to boarding school at thirteen. Nevertheless, the way she deals with this is disrespectful and hurtful for Steph; talking it through with her would have been better.) Later on, when a crucial bit of backstory is filled in, we also discover the depth of the trauma Steph was dealing with alone and unsupported since she was a small child, because Hannah refused to talk the matter over with her in order to protect Kayla.

The other narrative problem in this half of the novel is Della, Steph’s first girlfriend. Della occupies important space in To The Moon And Back because of her backstory: she was adopted by white Mormon parents despite her Cherokee father’s desire to keep her, and became a poster girl for the limitations of the Indian Child Welfare Act. I can see why Ramage wanted to include this thread, especially as, during the fifteen years she drafted and redrafted this novel, Della was one of the characters she kept returning to, her ‘favourite’. But I found Della to be by far the worst part of To The Moon And Back. She treats Steph appallingly. After they first sleep together, which for both of them is their first sexual experience, she ghosts her for A YEAR and then randomly kisses her out of nowhere, seemingly believing she can just waltz back into Steph’s life despite the pain she’s caused.

The narrative skates over this. This section is told from Della’s perspective rather than Steph’s, so it’s easy to miss, and we never get Steph’s take on these events. Hilariously, Steph is taken far more to task for trying to ‘ghost’ a later girlfriend, Nadia, while they’re living in a NASA hab together, even though (a) she obviously can’t given their close quarters (b) they are both experienced women who briefly hooked up – very different from ghosting a girl who’s been vulnerable enough to be intimate with you for the first time while she’s still figuring out her sexuality. Ramage forces Steph to constantly tell us how brilliant Della is and how much she doesn’t deserve her (‘what set her apart was… her extraordinary thoughtfulness’) but I could never forgive Della for this original act of cruelty. And even putting this aside, Della distorts the narrative in other ways as well. She gets point-of-view chapters she shouldn’t have. She acts as a distraction from Steph’s more important relationships with her mother and sister. And while Ramage’s research usually enriches the story, Della’s interest in animal biology is both unnecessarily detailed and cheesily metaphorical.

The NASA-funded Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) project on Mauna Loa.

My rage at Della was so great that I was heartily relieved when she pretty much vanishes from the second half of the novel. And To The Moon And Back improves from this point onwards, as well, although it’s still hampered by the negativity towards Steph that came before. In the later chapters, Steph’s behaviour becomes more justifiably problematic, although I still believe that the only romantic partner she really treats badly is the poor unnamed physicist whom she strings along in the hope of a permanent future. And even then, I felt that Steph was under pressure from her family to want a traditional kind of relationship – that they wanted her to settle down into a couple to make her queerness more palatable. Until the very end of the novel, I never thought this was something Steph wanted. It’s a shame, because I did like the ways that this novel dealt with queer family-making more generally, emphasising the importance of Steph’s relationship with her niece, and giving Della a surprisingly satisfying ending despite the other problems with her arc.

Ramage happily refuses to make Steph an Ambitious Woman Meeting A Bad End, but we are still always told that Steph’s problem is that she’s too focused on her own career goals. And yet, Steph’s flaws didn’t seem to me to come from this. She messes up most spectacularly when she first breaks quarantine in a simulated Mars mission on Mauna Loa in Hawai’i to go and see Kayla in a nearby protest camp that’s resisting NASA’s presence on this sacred ground. This invalidates the data gathered by the mission and puts her friend/hook-up, Nadia, in an especially difficult position. Later, she swings the other way and reports the protesters, including Kayla, to the police. But on the whole, Steph’s bad decisions here are driven by emotion, not ambition. It’s obviously not in her own interests to sneak out to the protest camp; she’s desperately trying to square the circle of following her own dreams while staying close to her sister and niece. Indeed, she puts a hell of a lot more effort into Kayla than Kayla does for her. The only really self-serving choice she makes is reporting the protesters, because her whole career is on the line.

‘Don’t you go thinking so little of people who suffer, like they don’t have a choice how they treat you’, Steph’s mother tells her near the end of the book, speaking of her abusive father. It’s a frustrating epitaph, because I felt that if Steph was offered a little more understanding, while others were made to take more accountability, this novel would have really shone. It has so much to say about Steph’s relationship with her Cherokee identity and about how we try and imagine possible futures, even in the wake of disaster. A light unreliable-narrator rewrite would make it clear that while Steph is not perfect, she also tends to be too hard on herself, absorbing other people’s criticisms. But instead, the distorting presence of black-hole Della warps the novel, and while I felt Steph’s family was mostly written well, Kayla also needed a bit more of a redemption arc. I ended up worrying that Ramage was told to frame Steph in this way to make her more likeable/’relatable’; if so, I think it has the opposite effect.

This all sounds like a pure rant… but I do recommend To The Moon And Back, because with all its flaws and bagginess it’s an incredibly engaging read that is much more interesting and original than much fiction out there (including its obvious comp title, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere, which is inferior in every way). I just wish it hadn’t made me feel so upset while reading it.

Source: NetGalley

I am back, with some random reviews & book updates

/ Laura / 14 Comments

I’ve not been able to post here or engage with other people’s posts for the last month due to (a) work (b) fiction-writing (c) being felled by the flu-like illness that seems to be making the rounds (d) not actually reading many books I wanted to or felt obliged to review… But now I am back! I’m really looking forward to catching up with everybody else’s reviews as well. Some recent reads:

Keza MacDonald, Super Nintendo. This popular history follows Nintendo from its beginnings as a company making hanafuda playing cards in the late 1880s to its time as a producer of toys to its dominance of the video game market, investing in both hardware and software. Although I’m only a very occasional and limited gamer, I deeply appreciate writing about video games that delves into their storytelling potential and the nuts and bolts of the ways they are made. I enjoyed Andrew Ervin’s Bit by Bit, for example, and Jason Schreier’s Blood, Sweat and Pixels, which looks behind the scenes at the making of games such as Stardew Valley, designed entirely by one man, to behemoths like Blizzard’s error-ridden Diablo III. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve read beautifully resonant literary essays on gaming: the Critical Hits collection edited by Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon had some real standouts, especially Elissa Washuta’s essay on The Last of Us, Larissa Pham’s on Genshin Impact, and Tony Tulathimutte’s on the status of gaming in society. Washuta’s own essay collection, White Magic, also has great writing on Red Dead Redemption 2 and Oregon Trail.

All this is to say that although I was never a big Nintendo gamer as a kid in the late 90s – I only ever had a couple of games for my Game Boy and had to sneak time on my friend’s N64 – I don’t think it was my lack of knowledge that stood in the way of me appreciating Super Nintendo. Overall, I found it a bit of a pedestrian potted history of Nintendo as a company, and wanted more about the games themselves and the experience of playing them. Because it’s structured around specific games, as well, there’s also a fair amount of repetition. While there are glimpses of what it could have been, such as the brief bit in the chapter on Animal Crossing that considers people’s experiences of playing the game during the Covid-19 pandemic, there was not enough of this for my liking and too many dates, lists and bare-bones accounts of events. However, big Nintendo fans may get more out of it. Source: NetGalley.

Senaa Ahmad, The Age of Calamities. I’ve been fighting with this book for some time because Ahmad is an outstanding writer, with a real willingness to joyfully experiment with what short stories can do, and yet I couldn’t force myself to connect with more than a couple of these. The easy standout is the first story in this collection, ‘Let’s Play Dead’, which in many ways also serves as a manifesto for what Ahmad wants to do in The Age of Calamities. A woman we might call Anne Boleyn has been murdered by her husband Henry, but she keeps on coming back, no matter how many gruesome and destructive deaths he devises for her. Here, Ahmad’s deliberately crazy, metaphor-heavy prose still shines (‘In Anne’s case, if it’s a game, the game is Monopoly, her game piece is a pewter chicken with its head décapité… the properties disintegrate every time she lands on them, and the dice are made of fire’), but the guardrails of the central conceit keep the story in line. I loved how Ahmad logically develops the idea of Anne’s immunity to death, and how she and Henry battle over it (‘He invents the portable long-barrelled firearm… acute ballistic trauma… But… she’s been busy, too, inventing: cardiopulmonary resuscitation… The 9-1-1 call… Organ transplants.’)

‘Let’s Play Dead’ is a great, exuberant, chilling story about centuries of history and patriarchy, and a real achievement on its own. Unfortunately, none of the other stories here worked for me. Partly, I think, because I do need something grounding in this kind of speculative fiction, and Ahmad’s other offerings lack the central thread that ‘Let’s Play Dead’ uses so effectively. I’d hoped to love this like I love the work of George Saunders and Karen Russell, but the balance felt off, making most of the stories so detached from even their own internal reality that they became unreadable. However, I’m very willing to accept that this is a failing in me as a reader rather than a failing of Ahmad’s as a writer; she’s clearly insanely talented. Source: NetGalley.

Shida Bazyar trans. Ruth Martin, Sisters in Arms. Kasih, Hani and Saya are three young women of colour from immigrant backgrounds who have grown up in Germany. When Saya is accused of a horrific crime, Kasih tells the story of their lives, dotting between place and time to try and give the reader – imagined as a stubborn white liberal who prides themselves on ‘not seeing race’ – a sense of what it is like to live in their bodies. While the non-chronological structure makes Sisters in Arms a slow read, I felt it was absolutely necessary in order for Kasih to trace particular threads that illuminate what she is telling us. For example, the girls originate the insult ‘almighty arsehole’ one rainy day when they’re teenagers and the bus that goes to their estate is abruptly cancelled, leading them to trudge for fifty minutes in the wet; Kasih juxtaposes this anecdote with the return of the insult in the present-day, when Saya confronts a far-right internet troll. The cutting off of their declining estate from the world in the pelting rain (‘I was completely soaked… But… now we’d been walking for long enough, all of this had stopped bothering me. I’d become indifferent to the cold, the slimy skin, the water in my shoes; I was one with the wet world. The only thing that still annoyed me was the fucking rain’) also serves as metaphor for the central subject of this novel: how to live in a country that constantly dehumanises you.

A lot of recent novels, such as Candice Carty-Williams’ Queenie, spell out harmful micro-aggressions to the (white) reader, but Sisters in Arms doesn’t waste time. Bazyar is much less interested in proving that these things happen, and much more interested in asking how her protagonists deal with it. Does it make sense to be like Saya, obsessed with the National Socialist Underground (NSU) trials that are ongoing during the book’s timeline? Like Kasih, aware but grimly resigned (‘the fucking rain’). Or like Hani, who often doesn’t pick up on the ways in which she’s mistreated until Saya tells her she ought to be angry? This intelligent and painful novel has no answers. I was unsure about the total bait-and-switch of the ending, the heavy use of direct address, and the decision to leave the girls’ backgrounds undefined, but this is still a notable achievement. Source: paperback purchase from Blackwells online.

In other news, I was recently on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week alongside David Szalay and Penny Woolcock being interviewed by Naomi Alderman about ‘Growing Up’, linked to my forthcoming history book We Have Come To Be Destroyed: Growing Up In Cold War Britain. You can listen to the episode on BBC Sounds here.

If I have any north-east based readers, I’m doing a couple other ‘in conversation’ type events related to the book soon:

Lit & Phil, Newcastle, 30th April, 6pm

Collected Books, Durham, 7th May, 7.30pm

I’ll also be at the Chalke History Festival near Salisbury on 23rd and 24th June, speaking in both the schools programme and the main festival.

And maybe a London event too – watch this space!

You can buy the book either direct from the publisher (Yale London) or on any bookselling website e.g. Blackwells.

Recently spotted in the wild at Collected.

The Gordon Burn Prize, 2026

/ Laura / 14 Comments

I don’t normally follow the Gordon Burn Prize, even though it’s administered by New Writing North and always awarded in Newcastle! This year, however, the longlist caught my eye. The Gordon Burn ‘recognises literature that is forward-thinking and fearless in its ambition and execution, often playing with style, pushing boundaries, crossing genres or challenging readers’ expectations’. It’s open to both fiction and non-fiction. Although I do feel that the judges winnowed down a strong longlist to a weaker shortlist, I was still excited to attend the prize ceremony at Northern Stage.

I managed to read (mostly by happenstance) six books from the longlist of twelve, and these were my thoughts [links to my full reviews, where they exist]:

Santanu Bhattacharya’s Deviants was one of my highly commended reads of 2025. It’s a nuanced look at three generations of gay men in and around what was once India’s ‘garden city’ and is now its ‘silicon plateau’, Bengaluru, refreshingly tracing uncle-nephew connections rather than father-son and refusing to buy into simple narratives of societal progress.

Colwill Brown’s We Pretty Pieces of Flesh was also one of my highly commended reads of 2025. I loved  its full-throttle evocation of early 00s teenage life in Doncaster, and called it ‘a time portal’ (despite not growing up in Donny).

Sarah Hall’s Helm left me rather underwhelmed; I’m a huge Hall fan, but I thought a lot of this millennia-spanning novel was almost deliberately silly and self-indulgent, especially the bits from the point of view of the wind, Helm. On the other hand, there were some powerful characters: from the matriarch of a neolithic tribe to a medieval priest determined to cast out demons to an eighteenth-century wife who wants to stop her husband blowing up the local witch stones to a present-day climatologist.

Elizabeth Lovatt’s Thank You For Calling The Lesbian Line, which I’m reading at the moment, is right up my street; it’s a mix of creative history, as Lovatt reimagines the stories of the women who phoned the London Lesbian Line in the 1990s, and memoir, tracing Lovatt’s own slightly-late coming out at the end of her twenties and her embracing of life as a lesbian. Because I’ve taught and written about modern British queer history, most of the historical material was already familiar to me, although I did appreciate the focus on the 1990s, where historians still rarely venture. My favourite chapter so far considers the material culture of the logbooks: the women’s handwriting, with bubbles dotting the Is; the doodles in the margins; the notes they leave to each other. This is certainly one I’d recommend, especially to newly out lesbians and/or lesbians who don’t know much about lesbian history. Source: paperback purchase from The Accidental Bookshop, Alnwick.

Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man is a gentle and sensitive account of the death of Perry’s father-in-law David, who was diagnosed with cancer and died only nine days later. I was especially struck by Perry’s reflections on taking on the role of carer and how it intersected with her feelings about not being a mother. ‘They were mothers. They would have known what to do’, she thinks of two of her friends when David first starts his decline. Later on, though, she finds this attitude changing: ‘in that first moment after David’s incontinence began, I felt a woman’s hand on my shoulder. I’ve rarely thought of myself as a woman, and certainly not a very satisfactory one – I failed to want children as much as I ought to have done, for example… But as I saw David standing there… women claimed me.’ Perry writes that this story is ‘politically indefensible’, presumably because it links into ideas that women are natural nurturers, and yet as someone who also finds it hard to negotiate their own (non-)feelings about gender identity while feeling linked to female legacies, I appreciated her honesty. David, too, is illuminated in the narrative as a genuinely ‘ordinary’ but utterly unique man. This didn’t hit me as hard as I think it has some others, but it deserves its place on the list. Source: hardback purchase from Collected Books, Durham.

Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez is a collection of linked short stories about a Penobscot community in Maine. While this draws attention to important issues faced by Native communities, it didn’t work for me at all as fiction; I found Talty’s prose flat and the book as a whole repetitive and shapeless.

The shortlisted titles, therefore, disappointed me somewhat, as all my favourites were gone, although it was nice to see the Lovatt getting recognised, and satisfying that I had still read exactly half the list:

All six shortlisted authors spoke about their work at the event – three in person and three on Zoom – so I learnt more about the titles I had not read:

L to R on Zoom: Maria Reva, Morgan Talty, Omar El Akkad. L to R in person: Anthony Shapland, Elizabeth Lovatt, Sarah Hall.

Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a short collection of linked essays that criticises passive liberal responses to the genocide in Gaza. El Akkad spoke beautifully about his book, describing the dissonance of writing about a conflict where he knows his tax dollars are paying for the bombs that are falling. He decried the idea that you can write non-political fiction or non-fiction: ‘the political is coming for you’. I was disappointed by El Akkad’s novel American War because it engaged with hugely promising material about a future civil war in the US but, for me, didn’t quite work as fiction. I can imagine he is a much better non-fiction writer, though.

Anthony Shapland’s A Room Above A Shop is a short novel about two men whom, as he put it, ‘lie, and lie together’. Set in the late 1980s, it explores a gay relationship in south Wales. Shapland spoke interestingly about how there are almost two time zones in the novel: the ‘room above’, where the two men can exist outside their social context, and the ‘shop’, where the reality of the decade they’re living in intrudes through, for example, leaflets about HIV/AIDS.

Maria Reva’s Endling had already been on my radar, but I was uncertain whether I’d be able to deal with its weirdness. It juxtaposes the story of three Ukrainian women working for a bridal agency in Ukraine that seeks to match them with men from overseas with the story of a scientist, Yeva, trying to protect endangered snails by finding them a place to breed. Yeva joins the agency to fund her snail studies; but her plans are shattered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I had a quick flick through this novel at the end and the prose appeals to me a lot more than I thought it would, so I might give it a go.

After a musical interlude from local artist Richard Dawson, Val McDermid, the chair of the judges, appeared to award the prize to…

ENDLING! I wasn’t especially backing any book, so this was a lovely moment, especially as Reva was visibly delighted to have won. She explained how surreal this was as she was sitting ‘in the room of my sister’ wearing slippers, and thanked her editors for taking a chance on such an experimental novel.

Have you read any of the Gordon Burn Prize longlist this year? Do any interest you?

Reading Diary, January 24th to February 25th, 2026

/ Laura / 14 Comments

Another overlapping Reading Diary, this time entirely due to The Starving Saints taking me So. Long.

V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. One narrative strategy I love in speculative fiction is when the author finds a beautifully simple conceit and simply follows it through to its logical conclusion. This is what Schwab pulls off, mostly, in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. The novel starts in the early eighteenth century, where Addie is reaching adulthood in a tiny French village, possibly somewhere in the region of Pays de la Loire. As she looks at the kinds of lives her friends are willingly embracing, she’s despite to believe there’s more for her than marriage and children. So, she makes a deal with the devil. (More books should start with somebody making a deal with the devil.) Addie doesn’t quite know what she’s signing up to, but it soon becomes clear: she will live forever, and have all the freedom she wants, but nobody will ever remember her. And yes, it turns out that is quite literal; she only exists while she remains within somebody’s sight, and once she departs, it’s as if they’re meeting her for the first time. It’s a life of one-night stands, meet-cutes and possible friendships that Addie stubbornly lives because the devil can only have her soul when ‘she does not want it any more’. But then, three hundred years later, in a bookshop in New York City, she meets Henry, who at first is not one of her flames: he doesn’t seem particularly special, in fact, apart from one thing. He remembers her.

For the first two-thirds of Addie La Rue, the turning-points land like depth charges. The midpoint is especially brilliant. It’s so beautifully structured that I forgave a lot of problems with Schwab’s writing, which at its best has the sweet once-upon-a-time feel of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale or Once Upon A River, and at its worst is very YA (Schwab leans way too much upon repetition). The book veered a little off course for me nearer the end, although I loved how Addie’s resolution mirrored her beginning. In particular, I would have preferred the devil to remain a relatively faceless figure rather than entering the story as a character. But what a satisfying ride. Source: Kindle Unlimited.

Caitlin Starling, The Starving Saints. I often see people writing ‘what the fuck did I just read’, and then it turns out to be a book that has a mild speculative twist, or an unexpected serial killer, or something. But this one definitely deserves the WTFDIJR label. Pretty much the entirety of The Starving Saints is set in a simulacrum of a medieval castle running out of food because of an extended siege. We follow three female characters: Phosyne, a former nun turned magic-worker who has already figured out how to purify water and is now trying to transmute food; Ser Voyne, a knight defined by her sense of duty and obligation; and Treila, who once flirted with Voyne but now regards her as her sworn enemy after she executed her father. But while each of these characters have concrete arcs, there’s little complex interiority here. Starling uses them like game pieces navigating an increasingly unsettling landscape. As the siege turns desperate, the castle is invaded by a group of Saints, who look like the icons that everybody worships but have a more sinister purpose. Phosyne, in particular, finds physical barriers dissolving as she begins to move through stone, light ever-burning candles, and boil water with a touch. As the world of the castle becomes ever bloodier, she and the other two women must negotiate an escape.

I almost gave up on reading this several times, because I struggle with fantasy/speculative fiction that doesn’t feel grounded within a kind of reality. But I ended up finishing it for a couple reasons: first, the atmosphere is just SO GOOD; second, and related to that, Starling knows exactly what she’s doing. Everything from her choice of character names to the way that the bizarre happenings in the castle tie back to the manipulation of matter made me realise that she’s thought this all through, and isn’t just riding on the vibes. Funnily enough, though on the surface this was nothing like Starling’s space horror-thriller The Luminous Dead, they are very obviously written by the same author (and not just because they both contain terrifying caving scenes). But Starling isn’t repeating tropes – instead, she seems to be developing a truly distinctive voice. I’d read more by her. Source: Kindle Unlimited.

Lily King, Writers and Lovers. I was intensely wary of this one but was convinced to pick it up by Rebecca and Elle’s glowing reviews. And it’s fair to say it’s definitely a cut above the usual messy millennial novel (Casey, our protagonist, is indeed actually a messy Gen X because the novel is set in 1997). This is basically because King is a very good writer. However, I found myself disappointed by the direction of the plot, despite some great material on Casey’s grief for her Cuban mother and the breakdown of her relationship with her father, who only cared about her as a potential golf prodigy. Writers and Lovers features two of my least favourite literary tropes: the Love Triangle, and the Writer Who Success Is Waiting For If Only They Could Finish Their Book. While I admit that this is slightly more plausible in 1997 than it would be now, I was still intensely annoyed at how easily Casey succeeds after posting off her barely-edited novel to a handful of literary agents. Argh. Would love to see a version of this narrative where it’s recognised that the pain is not in the writing but in the publishing. And, as always with a love triangle, I was rooting for the wrong side (SPOILERS but can’t a fictional woman for ONCE choose the nice safe option rather than the unreliable buzzy one?). A light easy read, but it got on my nerves too much for me to genuinely enjoy it. Source: Kindle 99p deal.

 

A double bind? Our Better Natures by Sophie Ward

/ Laura / 16 Comments

Warning: academic feminist ranting

Sophie Ward’s Our Better Natures is essentially three separate novellas doled out in pieces. Its central thread follows Phyllis, an ageing woman in Illinois whose son returns from the Vietnam War with a Korean wife, June [Park Choon Hee], and two children. Phyllis tries to welcome her son’s family, but is dogged by what she describes as a ‘stone in her stomach’: she’s frustrated by June’s different approach to housekeeping and cooking, and resentful of the care June receives from her son and from Phyllis’s husband. Two other strands follow two real-life women: radical feminist Andrea Dworkin on the cusp of writing her first book, Woman Hating (1974), and poet Muriel Rukeyser, who is campaigning for the release of Korean poet Kim Chi-Ha, a political prisoner in South Korea. While a couple of fragile links draw these threads together, I struggled to understand what they were doing in the same novel; Ward does little to even explore potentially rich thematic connections, such as (for example), the ways Dworkin’s analysis of women’s lives might connect to Phyllis’s experience. Phyllis’s story is the most fully realised, and I enjoyed some aspects of her arc (Dolly Parton the chicken!) but I still found it a little too simple and sweet for my liking. Muriel’s sections feel as if they have only been added to connect the other two.

Meanwhile, Ward’s treatment of Andrea Dworkin, who is the reason I picked this book up, is the biggest disappointment. Although we see Andrea witness big intellectual moments such as the debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky in Eindhoven in 1971, we get almost no sense of what her ideas are or how they develop. Her internal monologue consists of vaguely thinking about the plight of women. This is a bit of a travesty. I understand why Ward would be wary of taking on such a significant and controversial feminist figure, but she chose to put her in this novel, and there are also missteps that made me less confident that this sketchy version of Dworkin was a deliberate choice. Most egregiously, she has Dworkin think in 1972:

Beside her fell the shadows of her other selves. The Jewish child who wouldn’t accept religion. The rebellious adolescent who attended a conservative college. The independent young woman who craved the attention of successful men. The headstrong wife who was desperate to please her husband. She blamed her parents for this constant double bind.

Apart from the fluffiness of this internal monologue, I find ‘double bind’ a really unfortunate choice of words here. It has a specific feminist meaning developed by Marilyn Frye in 1983 that is not the simple idea of contradictory motives that Dworkin expresses in this novel. As Frye explains:

One of the most characteristic and ubiquitous features of the world as experienced by oppressed people is the double bind—situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation. 

This is a really important chunk of feminist theory because it explains that patriarchy hurts everyone – but it hurts women in specific ways that men do not experience. Men are able to ‘win’ under patriarchy by living up to patriarchal norms, even if those are not options they particularly like. In contrast, women, caught in the double bind, can’t win whatever they do. As Frye explicitly argues, we need to understand the structure of oppression, as ‘it seems to be the human condition that in one degree or another we all suffer frustration and limitation, all encounter unwelcome barriers, and all are damned and hurt in various ways’, and so simply recognising that we often have to make bad choices is not sufficient to explain the way women’s choices are restricted under patriarchy.*

Therefore, fictional Dworkin is using a term here that would not be popularised and adapted by feminists until the 1980s – although it was first coined by anthropologists studying schizophrenia in the 1950s – and she’s using it in the wrong way. She might have experienced tensions between what she wanted and what she was expected to want, but they’re not double binds. She implies she could have lived up to social expectations by picking the ‘right’ option (e.g. being a good Jewish woman or a good wife). While this may seem nitpicky, it sums up my problems with the lack of engagement with the specifics of the historical development of second-wave feminism in this novel, as well as the wafty way that Dworkin is made to think. I’m sure that Ward knows much more than I do about Dworkin’s early writings and so maybe I am wrong about the word choice here, but ‘double bind’ is such an important and misunderstood term that I’d question its inclusion anyway.

I haven’t read anything else by Ward and I’d heard good things about her earlier novels, so this wasn’t the best introduction to her work or writing for me. If you’ve read Love and Other Thought Experiments or The Schoolhouse, do let me know if they worked better! (Also: she gets props forever for having played one of Mombi’s heads in Return to Oz.) Source: NetGalley

*For more on this, see Sukaina Hirji’s analysis of Frye in ‘Oppressive double binds’, Ethics, 131, 4 (2021), open access.

It’s the climb: Crux by Gabriel Tallent

/ Laura / 12 Comments

Dan and Tamma are finishing up high school and bouldering in their spare time, hitching lifts out into the Joshua Tree National Park in California’s Mojave desert to ‘send’ (complete) tricky trad climbing challenges. Both are acutely aware that they are trying to execute a painful, slow U-turn away from their family histories. Dan’s mother, Alexandra, wrote a bestselling 900-page novel as a teenager that briefly made her a literary darling; but after the failure of her follow-up, she’s written nothing since. With no formal education, Alexandra had no cushion when the money ran out, and so she’s desperate for Dan to go to college, even though he’d rather take a camper van into the desert. Tamma’s mother, Kendra, has always been told she is trailer trash and will amount to nothing, and now is maliciously forcing the same narrative onto Tamma, who’s roped into caring for her niblings after her sister’s husband takes off.

The way Gabriel Tallent tells this story is deliberately larger-than-life, unrealistic, messily open. For the first few pages I found myself tripping over my instinctive reaction of nobody would ever talk like that! and then I just went with it. Tallent does not care for the rules of dialogue. He gives ADHD Tamma, in particular, huge paragraphs of worked-up prose, especially when she’s talking to Dan:

The legends of climbing, dude, lived in caves… But now they’ve been replaced by glossy, anorexic, pampered trust-fund bitches with nine-step skincare routines like Paisley Cuthers! That’s not fair… This is climbing. It’s about facing death and pain and darkness and your own demons to do something cool; to climb is to be almost shitting yourself with fear and yet to make the next move anyway, and what does Paisley Cuthers know about any of that? I don’t want to lose to Paisley Fucking Cuthers, Dan! I want to come out of this empty godforsaken litter box and walk out onto those competition mats and wreck her, wreck her and her flawless, beckoning armpits.’

(When Tamma actually meets Paisley in competition, I was truly delighted to see them bonding over the fact that, despite the surface differences, they’re both weird, awkward obsessives).

Tallent, too, is happy to be explicit about the kind of story he’s telling. Not for him ellipsis or allusion. He lets our characters wring out their thoughts on the page. Dan grapples with the fact that Alexandra and Kendra used to be best friends, and yet had a terminal falling-out. He keeps coming back to this problem, feeling he has to figure out the situation so the same thing doesn’t happen to him and Tamma, and reimagines their last, fatal conversation:

Alexandra is back from some tour abroad for her second book… Kendra is a single mom, living in a trailer with three kids… Kendra stands there and says “I could’ve been a writer if I’d had the chance.” And Alexandra gives her this look… there is this moment where Alexandra can admit to her friend that she is afraid, that she herself fears that she is not a writer… Kendra too is full of rage at the smallness of her life… [But she is] not a girl that can be angry, because an angry girl will never have the things Kendra wants, and so it is not that Kendra is angry… It is that Alexandra can not accept her…

And this thing [Kendra] says, “I could’ve been a writer if I’d had the chance”, is a bid for comfort. Tell me I am not nothing, she is saying… Tell me that I am not alone… [But] with this one word, chance, Kendra seems to suggest that Alexandra does not deserve what she has, and because this is exactly what Alexandra fears to be true, she cannot speak… all she can do is stand there… and give her closest friend in all the world this look, a look of total contempt… a look that says, I would rather be totally alone than extend any generosity to you, in this moment, when I myself am so scared and imperilled.

Just as it seems unlikely that Tamma would talk in the way she does, it is unlikely that Dan would think in this way, that he would be able to give this heartbreakingly accurate account of the ending of their mothers’ friendship. Yet, I think Tallent shows that sometimes you have to get things wrong to get them right; that Dan and Tamma are such emotionally real characters because he isn’t obeying certain writerly rules. And this is before we even get to the fantastic descriptions in Crux: from gorgeous desert scenery to technical unpickings of rock climbs to the illumination of the mundane: ‘Behind them lay the low, rowlike buildings of the high school. Before them: charcoal-covered tarmac; hurricane fencing; a scrubby field of crabgrass and cranesbill; a cinder track, partially flooded by sprinklers; and a horizon gauzy with clouds.’

Tallent has something to say with Crux, and he is definitely going to say it. In the end, it’s Alexandra’s story that becomes the key warning for both Dan and Tamma. Alexandra achieved the greatest success she could have expected but still found her life empty. Tamma learns this lesson earlier than Dan, as she starts to realise that she doesn’t scale boulders for their tops but for their cruxes, the point at which you have to truly commit to yourself and the difficult thing you are trying to do (fellow late 00s young persons sing along with me: ‘it’s the CLIMBBBBBB’). I was totally bowled over by this big untidy book, and I can’t wait to read Tallent’s debut. Source: NetGalley.

Reading Diary, January 19th to February 3rd, 2026

/ Laura / 11 Comments

Because I read multiple books at once, there is some overlap between the end of my last Reading Diary and the start of this one.

George Saunders, Vigil. Jill Blaine once inhabited a physical body, but since her untimely death decades ago she has found herself tasked with ferrying other souls towards the afterlife by being present for them in their final moments. Sometimes, she’s pulled back towards memories of her own happy existence with young husband Lloyd, although she’s always slightly detached from the realm of human language: ‘One “Christmas Eve”, when I had “stomach thingy”, he “called in sick”, yelling at “Sergeant Blue” that, yes, “for crapsake”, he knew they were “short-staffed due to the holidays” but what “the hey” did that have to do with the fact that “his wife, man”… could “barely stand the hell up”?’. Jill also encounters other wandering souls stuck on their own stories, like Clyda and William, who can relate each others’ tales of their deaths word for word even though they don’t really care (‘Then night came on, William said. And I thought: I shall never see another sunrise… I couldn’t believe it, honestly, said Clyda. I actually felt my spine crack’.) But Jill’s latest assignment is a difficult one. She’s been sent to comfort the dying oil tycoon KJ Boone, whose booming business and deliberate manipulation of media narratives about climate change through fake science is one big reason for the world burning.

When I read Saunders’ previous novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which also deals with lingering spirits, I wrote: ‘he is simply brilliant at making impossible things seem internally coherent. His vision of the afterlife is weird, untidy and as solid as a story you feel like you’ve been hearing all your life.’ Certainly, I would never have picked Vigil up if it hadn’t been by Saunders, and his beautifully bizarre writing is the only thing that saves it. Unlike Lincoln in the Bardo, the set-up of Vigil feels cliched and sentimental; I don’t think I found the novel as preachy as some readers have done because I appreciated how seriously Saunders grappled with Boone’s internal world, but it’s definitely a book with A Message. This is novella-length but it took me a stupidly long time to read because I could only cope with it in very short bursts. I truly admire what Saunders does with words but if you’ve not read him before, I’d recommend you start with Lincoln in the Bardo or his short story collection Tenth of December instead. Source: NetGalley.

Juhea Kim, City of Night Birds. I’m a sucker for books about ballet, so I was always going to enjoy following the trajectory of Natalia, who begins her career as a student in St Petersburg and ends up performing for companies across the world as a prima ballerina. One common pitfall in adult novels about ballet is that they go so all out in decrying the problematic aspects of the art form that they leave no space for our characters to also experience joy, pride and love of the craft, often falling into the Ambitious Women Meet Bad Ends trope. Happily, City of Night Birds is not one of those novels. In fact, its biggest strength is its portrayal of Natalia, who is unashamedly ambitious, and also scarred by the absence of her father and a difficult childhood relationship with her mother; she struggles to form close relationships, although her supportive friendship with fellow dancer Nina is a beacon. Kim does a beautiful job of inhabiting Natalia’s lonely psyche, giving us somebody who is deeply relatable even when she is distant. As for the writing, it’s good enough to carry the novel: Kim relies on a few repeating images, such as a swarm of black birds, that resonate but never really become truly transcendent except in a brief sequence when Natalia goes off her meds and feels she is losing her mind. To be honest, the prose is probably a little too tell-y at times, but I believed so completely in Natalia’s emotional world that I was willing to forgive some clunkiness. The blurb and prologue frame City of Night Birds as a story about Natalia’s relationships with two men, but thankfully it goes far beyond this and gives us a much bigger, more nuanced portrait of somebody who puts art at the centre of her life. Source: Paperback purchase from Collected Books, Durham.

ML Rio, If We Were Villains. These days we’re flooded with dark academia, but I remember when there were far fewer such novels, and they were almost all carbon copies of The Secret History. Donna Tartt’s influence is evident in If We Were Villains, but it’s also one of the most successful examples of this sub-genre that I’ve ever read. Oliver is a final-year theatre student at an exclusive arts college in rural Illinois, immersing himself in Shakespeare alongside a tight group of six other peers. Like Tartt’s classicists, this group have buried themselves so deeply in a different way of thinking that it’s started to affect the way they interact with the world. Most obviously, they throw Shakespeare quotations into their conversations at every opportunity (something that seemed eminently plausible to me, given how long they’ve spent studying these texts); but their relationships with each other are also twisted and heightened because they have to operate at the highest pitches of human emotion during a relentless series of full-fledged performances, improvised scenes and readings.

Tartt’s depiction of her individual characters is unparalleled, but I actually found myself more convinced by the way in which Rio’s group interact with each other. (Perhaps this makes sense, given the contrast between Greek tragedy and early modern theatre?) There’s a buried relationship at the core of this novel that isn’t a twist, exactly, because it’s spottable from the start, but as Oliver gradually realises what is going on, I felt his conflicted emotions and ultimately, his grief and shock. Similarly, Rio doesn’t play games with the reader to hide the identity of the ‘villain’ in this novel – the thematic pattern of the narrative makes it quite clear whodunnit – but how much more satisfying it is to get to experience that journey with the characters rather than being deliberately wrong-footed. Finally, a particular highlight is the way Rio writes the staging of the various plays the characters perform in, from Macbeth to Julius Caesar to Romeo and Juliet to King Lear: she clearly knows her stuff, and I felt as if I was watching by a lake or near a stage spangled with mirrored stars as well. Totally immersive. Source: Kindle Unlimited.

Reading Diary, January 10th to 21st, 2026

/ Laura / 17 Comments

Caroline Palmer, Workhorse. When I was in my very early twenties, commuting from Cambridge to London, working in publishing, and having various bad relationships, one of the comfort books I’d read over and over was Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada. My life had little in common with Andy’s – my job couldn’t have been more laid-back, or my co-workers less fashionable – but something about the totally foreign stresses of her days was intensely soothing. So, having pretty much memorised that novel, I was READY for Workhorse. We’re back in the New York of the early noughties, following another low-ranking editorial assistant who wants more. But while Andy settled for a lot of passive-aggressive complaining and painfully-acquired competence, Clodagh, our alcoholic narrator, is much more determined. She learns the ways of the magazine industry with unnerving focus, and although she can never quite shed a certain awkwardness, she’s a ruthless social climber.

One of the things I most enjoyed about Workhorse is how Clodagh’s narration slowly turns dark and unreliable. She tries to win our sympathy with a narrative about not coming from inherited wealth – being a ‘Workhorse’ rather than a ‘Showhorse’ – but it’s increasingly difficult to buy it, especially as the supposed privilege of her rivals is peeled away. A number of pivotal incidents in the novel are observed by Clodagh with the appropriate emotions, but I found myself wondering whether she’s more involved in making things go her way than she ever tells us. We also gradually sense the looming financial crisis out of the corner of her eye, because she never focuses outside herself for long enough to see what’s coming. It’s a shame, therefore, that Workhorse is easily twice as long as it needs to be, as this blunts the impact of what are some genuinely brilliant set-pieces (the art theft! the power cut! the babysitting debacle!). The book seems to settle down softly into its landing rather than slice towards it because each of these incidents is cushioned by so much filler. And while I can read about early-noughties fashion magazine drama forever (as I say, clocked up approx 1000 re-reads of The Devil Wears Prada), Workhorse really did feel weirdly bloated. I wish it’d had better editing, because it could have been savage. Source: NetGalley.

Emma Donoghue, The Paris Express. I’d seen only lukewarm reviews of this novel set aboard a train travelling from Granville to Paris in 1895, but I’m a Donoghue completist, so I picked it up anyway. And I was pleasantly surprised! Perhaps it helped to be warned in advance about the large cast of characters and the focus on switching from vignette to vignette, but I managed to sort out the key players in my head pretty quickly, and I loved the way Donoghue used this structural choice to give us a cross-section of Parisians at the time. There is, I think, a tension between her cherry-picked cast – she mostly gives us figures who’ve left important traces in the historical record rather than passengers whom we know were actually on this train – and the intentions of the novel. We find out at the beginning that one of the passengers, Mado, is a budding anarchist carrying a bomb in her lunch bucket who’s planning to blow up as much of the train as she can to draw attention to the corrupt governance of France and its empire.

For some of the novel, then, I wondered if Donoghue was going for a kind of Light Perpetual conceit – telling the stories of ordinary people to demonstrate how much would be lost if Mado does upturn that bucket. But, because she stacks the decks with notable figures from a female pioneer of moving pictures to a woman who modelled for Gauguin to a little boy who grows up to be a hero of the French Resistance, this can’t land. To be fair, I think her intention was more to use the confined interior of the train as a way of giving us a slice of Paris in 1895, which is fair enough. And while other reviewers have complained that her research is showing, I still think that Donoghue is so good at finding telling, fascinating historical details that I don’t mind her throwing a few too many of them in, although I agree that she’s written novels where the setting/time period is better integrated (e.g. The Pull of the Stars). I relished finding out about how a fin de siècle steam train takes on water en route, why Montparnasse is called Montparnasse, and how people would actually sell hot coffee from tanks on their backs. Yes, the small bits from the point of view of the train don’t work (why are so many writers letting inanimate objects narrate over the past few years?), but this was an engrossing ride. Source: Jesmond Library #LoveYourLibrary

Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves. I complete my re-read of the unfinished Gentleman Bastards series with a novel that I also remembered less than fondly, although I preferred it to Red Seas Under Red Skies when I first read it. My only memories of this novel were: 1. We finally meet Sabetha, Locke’s long-lost love who’s been teased throughout the first two books; 2. In one thread, set when the gang are teenagers, we have to suffer through a lot of cod-fantasy-Shakespeare as they perform in a play as part of a con; 3. In the present-day thread, Locke and Jean have to manipulate the results of an ongoing election, which could have been a great plot but falls a bit flat; 4. We find out something really disturbing about Locke’s true nature, though obviously nothing disturbing enough that I could remember what it was.

Like Red Seas Under Red Skies, I enjoyed this book more on a re-read, although I think it’s more obviously flawed than either of the first two. Sabetha is a big narrative problem. She arrives trailing so much weight that Lynch struggles to do anything interesting with her, even though he’s clearly realised (possibly after writing book one) that it isn’t great to have your only central female character be defined solely by how mysterious and heartbreaking she is, and he needs to give her more to do. And although he tries hard, it’s not really a problem he can solve given the existing architecture of the series; we might have got some fantastic female pirates in Red Seas but we needed more women in these books from the start (perhaps replacing Calo and Galdo, whom annoy me more whenever they appear on the page). The writing also becomes oddly stilted whenever Locke and Sabetha interact; their dialogue is so convoluted, even though both characters can speak perfectly naturally in other contexts. Plot-wise, the play is boring and the election under-used, but luckily both take up much less space than I’d remembered. And The Republic of Thieves is bookended by two amazingly creepy sequences that make it worthwhile, the first when Locke is being cured of poisoning by some terrifying alchemists, and the second… I’ll avoid spoiling it. I now think that I will read the next in this series if Lynch ever publishes it, which is something I wasn’t sure about when I’d only re-read The Lies of Locke Lamora. Source: already-owned Kindle copy.

Laura Rereading: Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

/ Laura / 7 Comments

Mild spoilers for The Lies of Locke Lamora.

Before re-reading: I first read Red Seas Under Red Skies in January 2015, when I was 29. I remembered very little about this sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora other than it starts with main duo Locke and Jean trying to pull off an amazing con in a fantasy version of Las Vegas, but veered far too quickly for my liking into a very different plot where they get entangled with pirates. My impression was that it was a slow and unevenly paced read after the impeccably structured first book. I actually rated it even lower than the third book in the Gentleman Bastards series, The Republic of Thieves, which I really struggled with. I didn’t review any of the series at the time.

After re-reading: Honestly, this has put the wind up me; I feel like all my reading intuitions have been called into question. Red Seas Under Red Skies is actually GREAT. Indeed, I feel confident in saying that it’s better than The Lies of Locke Lamora. When I re-read that one, one of the things I struggled with was the lack of interiority. Obviously, the Gentleman Bastards series doesn’t deal in sophisticated psychological realism, but I was frustrated by the near-omniscient narrator and the amount of head-hopping. Red Seas Under Red Skies, in contrast, focuses on the two central characters, Locke and Jean, and it’s much the better for it, especially as their extended gang in Locke Lamora always felt like placeholders for obvious reasons. The pair’s platonic partnership is also interrogated in a way it wasn’t in the first novel; their bond is challenged from the start as Jean has to deal with Locke’s intense depression after what happened in Camorr, and continues to come under fire.

And while the wider cast here is not complex, they land more satisfyingly on the page than they did in Locke Lamora, especially the pirates. I enjoyed our pirate captain, Zamira, who is also a thirty-nine-year-old black mother of two (Lynch has explicitly said that he wanted to write a wish-fulfilment character for an audience that’s not served as well as nerdy white men), and her first mate, Ezri, who bonds with Jean over both literature and hand-to-hand combat strategies. Tonally, too, Red Seas Under Red Skies worked better for me than its predecessor, which felt a little callous at times. Partly, it’s because this book deals less in gruesome tortures than the last, and partly, it’s because we see more genuine emotion from our quippy heroes, so the violence is less jarring.

I wonder if this re-read is a lesson in managing reader expectations. When I first read Red Seas Under Red Skies, I loved the opening sequence in the Sinspire, an elite gambling tower, so much that I resented being dragged away from it, even though this con takes up a lot more page-space in the book than I’d remembered. Because I knew what was coming this time, I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of Sinspire we got and ready to appreciate the pirate sections for what they were. And while the book does take an about-turn when Locke and Jean are blackmailed into setting out on the high seas, it’s still as beautifully paced as its predecessor. I might hate side-quests in fantasy novels, but this is a truly satisfying one, with some especially hilarious moments as our landlubber heroes try to learn nautical jargon and practice the roles of sea captains:

“Imaginary sailors! Tacks and sheets!” Jean waved his arms and hollered his instructions to the invisible deck hands. “Smartly now, you slothful dogs!”

“Master de Ferra,” called Locke, “that imaginary sailor is not minding his duty!”

Red Seas Under Red Skies starts with a rather cheap and unnecessary trick: a prologue that foregrounds a dramatic incident from late in the novel that ends up amounting to nothing much at all. It might have been better, instead, to give us a scene that signalled the nautical plot, so we knew what was coming. But this 600+ page novel was an absolute, immersive, old-fashioned delight; while I may not have read it in December, it delivered everything I want from a doorstopper. I’ve got to re-read the third one now, haven’t I?

Source: my original paperback copy, which has clearly had a bit of a time of it; I must have dropped it in the bath at some point.

Rating January 2015: ***1/2

Rating January 2025: ****1/2

Have you ever completely changed your mind about a book after rereading – for better or worse?