Tag: USA

The Heart Goes Last

The Heart Goes Last is a novelisation of Margaret Atwood’s online Positron series, which appeared on the defunct Byliner website between 2012 and 2013. I dimly recall Atwood talking about the series on social media but never read it. It doesn’t matter. The novel stands alone perfectly well. Set in a near future where the aftermath of a financial crash has left the rich sequestered on the West Coast of America, the majority of society mostly jobless and homeless, and the lawless living an unfettered existence trading on a lucrative black market, the novel follows Charmaine and Stan as they try to survive the decimation of their previously average life.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

Lessons in Chemistry

Bonnie Garmus’s celebrity-endorsement-bedecked global number one and multi-million-copy bestseller Lessons in Chemistry was a Christmas gift in 2024. It’s a curious fish, part roustabout women’s lib comedy, part devastating document of just how abhorrently men can treat women in the workplace and the home, part sensitive examination of how tragedy shapes people’s lives and how love doesn’t always conquer all. There’s a workplace rape after 18 pages of light-hearted scene setting that pulled me up short, just as I was settling in for a less serious read than has been my habit of late. It sets out the stall of this exploration of the fight for equality in the workplace as seen through the life of one very particular woman.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 9

Season of the Swamp

Yuri Herrera is a new author to me. Season of the Swamp is his imagining of an 18 month period between December 1853 and June 1855 when Benito Juárez was in exile in New Orleans. The novel is described as speculative historical fiction. The historical elements are drawn from contemporary documents recording events in New Orleans during the period Juárez was resident there. Of Juárez’s activities in the city, Herrera tells us, there are no records.

For the unfamiliar, like me, Herrera provides historical context in his introduction to the novel, explaining that Juárez, a Zapotec, was a governor of Oaxaca who eventually rose to become the first indigenous president of Mexico in 1858. His exile was in retaliation for refusing President Santa Anna entry to Oaxaca in 1847. His autobiography says nothing of his time in New Orleans, and only records his date of arrival and date of departure. It is this reticence on the part of Juárez about a period which shaped the political beliefs that would lead him to power in his own country, that Herrera felt compelled to write about and construct a version of events that might explain how Juárez “evolved into the liberal leader who would transform the trajectory of his country over the decades to come.”

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 5

Ice Cream Man Volume 1: Rainbow Sprinkles

I was in Forbidden Planet with my husband last summer. He was looking for a couple of indie comics and I was idly browsing the shelves of trade paperbacks. The cover of the first collected volume of Ice Cream Man caught my eye. I picked it up and read the first few pages of the first chapter. I liked it enough to take a chance on it. I haven’t read a comic series since I finished The Sixth Gun and thought that Ice Cream Man might be a series I could get into.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 0

The Visitors

Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ novel The Visitors follows a former textile artist turned art supply seller, known only as C, as she navigates keeping her business afloat, repaying her medical debt, crushing on her childhood friend, and hallucinating a garden gnome in a business suit. It’s a novel about the precariousness of life on a planet being killed by humans where our reliance on technology makes us vulnerable to hackers who want to disrupt the status quo. It’s also about self-interest and the different forms that takes. It’s about friendship, capitalism and insanity.

The right frame of mind can make or break a book, I find. I picked this one up during a tough few days. Consequently, I didn’t have the patience for its beginning. I almost put it down.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 9

Swanna in Love

It is 1982 and Swanna Swain is 14 years old. Her parents, both academics in their forties, both having a midlife crisis, have separated. They send Swanna and her younger brother Madding to summer camp because her father is moving in with his new girlfriend and her mother has decamped from New York to an artist colony in Vermont for the summer. Camp is over when we meet Swanna, sitting next to her friend Jacquie Beller on the bus back to New York, looking forward to reading the personal ads in the back of the Weekly Wag on the way. But Swanna’s mother has other plans, and Swanna has to leave the bus. What follows is a perfectly observed comedy of teenage incredulity, parental irresponsibility and the complications of desire.

Jennifer Belle establishes her heroine quickly as a smart character, a teenager who makes people laugh unintentionally and a near-adult seeking to leave childhood behind. She’s sure of herself in some ways, uncertain of who she is in others, and still expecting the adults around her to keep her safe while she stretches her independence. I liked her a lot.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 1

Your Love is Not Good

Johanna Hedva’s Your Love is Not Good is one of my Year of Reading Independently books from this year’s attempt on Mount To Read. It was part of my And Other Stories subscription in 2023. I picked it up because February is LGBT+ History Month in the UK and I hadn’t read any LGBTQ+ literature since last August. I went into it knowing only what is on the publisher’s website and what is written in the blurbs. On the basis of the arty gushing, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it as much as I did.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 1

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Death Comes for the Archbishop is a retelling of the story of Catholic priests Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf and their mission to New Mexico. Set in the period shortly after New Mexico became an incorporated territory of the United States, the novel includes fictionalised accounts of actual historical events. Lamy is recast by author Willa Cather as Jean Marie Latour and Machebeuf as Joseph Vaillant, names chosen to represent their characters. Latour is the reserved intellectual, Vaillant the bold soldier of Christ.

Given the title, I expected something filled with tragedy. Death Comes for the Archbishop holds such a portent of doom, and yet that is far from what the book contains. It’s a poetic account of service to faith, friendship and finding a home in a strange land.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 2

The Flame Alphabet

The Flame Alphabet is the second novel by Ben Marcus. Published in 2012, it depicts the impact of an epidemic that turns first children’s and then everyone’s speech toxic. At the start of the novel, Sam is packing to leave his home somewhere in New York state with his ailing wife Claire while their teenage daughter Esther is at school. Esther’s words cause a pain that Sam describes as crushing – “an intolerable squeezing in the chest and the hips”. From this beginning, Sam describes how he came to be in such a situation, unpacking the shape of a pandemic that feels unknowable.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4