A Queer History of Newfoundland, by Rhea Rollman

Rhea Rollman’s 500+ page survey of the histories of LGBTQ+ people and movements on the island of Newfoundland can’t be described as anything less than epic. This is a popular, not a scholarly history — intended for the general reader, but with enough references and footnotes to demonstrate the staggering amount of research involved.

Much of this research is in the form of interviews, meaning that this is not entirely, but largely, an oral history — perhaps necessary for this type of work, which is dedicated to uncovering a history that was often downplayed or fully omitted from “official” written histories. The personal insights of LGBTQ+ people talking about their experience decades after the fact are insightful and often heart-rending.

Perhaps surprisingly to people who know the local literary scene, this important piece of non-fiction was published not by one of the established local publishers but by Engen Books, a small press which until now has been best known for genre fiction. I applaud Engen’s move into non-fiction, as more publishers publishing more books is good for all of us. I did feel, however, that there were places where a book as important and impactful as this one could have been better served by the more thorough editing and fact-checking provided by a press more experienced in publishing this type of nonfiction. I’m sure Engen’s capacity for handling this type of work will grow if they continue to expand in this area.

Regardless of that small nit-pick, I learned a great deal from reading this book and will keep it on my shelves as a reference. It’s an important piece of local history that helps fill in many significant gaps in our knowledge.

VenCo, by Cherie Dimaline

This is a darkly whimsical thriller about a Toronto Metis woman, Lucky St. James, who discovers she is part of a coven of witches seeking to complete their number so they can defeat an immortal witch-hunter. It’s a fun, quick read (and a nice road trip story, as Lucky has to go seek out her destiny with her grandmother Stella in tow). I’m wondering if it’s intended to set the reader up for a sequel, since the one issue I had was that it felt like the novel took a really long time to get to the action — by the time it picked up the book was almost over, which left me feeling like maybe this is just Act One of a longer planned story arc. A little searching around online reveals that Dimaline is working on a sequel, so that’s good to know!

The Perfumist of Paris (Jaipur Trilogy #3), by Alka Joshi

I ended my review of Alka Joshi’s previous book, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur, by saying “I hope there is a third in the series, as we’ve yet to get a story focused on Lakshmi’s sister Radha, and that would round out a trilogy very nicely.” This is that book, which does indeed round out the trilogy nicely.

Several years after the events of The Secret Keeper, Radha has left India and is married, living and working in Paris trying to build a career and reputation for herself as a perfumist. We’re on the cusp of the women’s movement now, and Radha’s husband has trouble understanding why she wants to carry on working when he has a career and they have two daughters to raise. Radha’s quest to become a perfume artist in her own right not only puts her on a collision course with her husband and mother-in-law, but also takes her on a trip back to India and into an encounter with some of those secrets that were kept back in Jaipur, all those years ago. I wasn’t as engaged in this novel as the first two because the Paris setting wasn’t as intriguing to me as the Indian settings of the other two books, but it did tie off the stories of all the characters nicely and give a sense of completion to the trilogy.

The Tommy & Tuppence mysteries, by Agatha Christie

Several months ago I watched the TV series Why Didn’t They Ask Evans, based on an Agatha Christie novel. I really enjoyed the relationship between the young couple who were solving the mystery, and wondered if Christie had written any more about them. She had not — Why Didn’t They Ask Evans is a stand-alone novel — but looking into that led me to the series she did write about a detective couple: the “Tommy and Tuppence” mysteries, beginning with The Secret Adversary in 1922, and ending with Postern of Fate in 1973, three years before Christie’s death. Though Christie wrote only five books about them, they predate Miss Marple, and their last adventure was Christie’s last novel.

At their best — i.e., in the first three of these books — Tommy Beresford and his (eventual) wife Prudence (better known as Tuppence) are a much lighter version of my favourite fictional detectives, Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. They appear in the early 1920s as childhood friends who are now veterans of the First World War — Tommy having served overseas and Tuppence in the VAD. Both are having a hard time finding work and making a living in postwar London, and decide to start a detective agency. They are immediately caught up in mysterious events well beyond their understanding, but their quick wits and courage allow them to triumph. In Partners in Crime they solve a series of mysteries in short-story form while also being engaged in a larger investigation; in N or M? they are a middle-aged married couple whose children are both involved in the war effort during the Second World War; Tommy and Tuppence feel sidelined by their age until they are drawn into intelligence work in an effort to unmask a German spy.

The mysteries themselves are pretty light, even flimsy in places, but the banter and affection between the two main characters is a lot of fun, and I really like how Tommy sees Tuppence as fully his equal throughout, even when other people underestimate her as the female partner of the pair. She is always a step ahead and it’s hard to get anything past her. N or M? was by far my favourite of the five books, with the tightest and most interesting plot, and the best character development of the series.

I love the fact that Christie returned to this couple over the decades and that the characters, unlike Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot, aged in real time and were impacted by real-world events as the decades passed. However, I did find that the two later books, By the Pricking of My Thumbs and Postern of Fate, which were written when both the writer and her characters were senior citizens, were by far the weakest. This didn’t have to be the case — there’s no reason you couldn’t have elderly people who are still sharp and curious solving current and interesting mysteries. (See the Thursday Murder Club books for an example of this being very well done). However, both plots revolve around Tuppence getting intrigued by something mysterious that happened years or decades ago — one involving a house in a painting she is given, and one triggered by notes in a book she finds in the new house she and Tommy are moving into — and neither of them feels particularly interesting or compelling. The last book, particularly, is very rambling and discursive, with too much dialogue for the amount of plot movement that actually happens, but given that Christie was elderly herself at this point her powers as a novelist may not have been at their peak.

Still, I like Tommy and Tuppence and I’m glad to have read the whole series.

Clytemnestra, by Costanza Casati

Clytemnestra, a debut novel by Costanza Casati, falls into a category with many others I’ve read recently: imagining the Greek myths through the lens of a woman’s point of view. Casati has picked an interesting character to focus on here: Clytemnestra, sister of Helen of Troy, wife (and eventual killer) of Agamemnon, mother of Iphigenia who is used as a human sacrifice by her father. There’s more than enough drama in Clytemnestra’s story for an engaging novel, which this is.

I didn’t find it as purely enjoyable to read as Claire North’s books about Penelope, Madeline Miller’s Circe, or Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships or Stone Blind. Rather that bringing in goddesses as narrators and using the mythic/supernatural as a central part of the story, Casati seems to be trying to retell a myth as a straight piece of historical fiction. While the gods are, of course, mentioned in Clytemnestra, the explanations for all the story’s supposedly mythic elements — including Helen being the daughter of Zeus, who rapes Leda when he’s in the form of a swan — are purely naturalistic and human-centred. This leads to a plot that sometimes feels a little strained and incredible; paradoxically, if gods, demigods, and monsters were really active in this story, it would actually feel more believable.

Despite this criticism, I did enjoy reading this take on the tragic story of Clytemnestra.

Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang

This is a book I’d heard so much about before reading it. You’ve probably heard a lot about it too. It’s a story about an aspiring writer named June Hayward and her friend, the much more popular writer Athena Liu. While June’s debut novel sank without a trace, Athena is the darling of the literary world — until her sudden death. By coincidence (really — this isn’t a murder story, it’s a genuine coincidence) June happens to be in Athena’s apartment when she dies, and amid her shock, somehow ends up grabbing the manuscript for Athena’s latest work in progress. When June ends up finishing the work and publishing it as her own — under a pen name that makes is sound as though she might possibly be Chinese — the plot gets rolling.

This is an extremely engaging and compelling read that dives into a lot of the really awful things about the publishing world, about the crushing jealousy authors can sometimes feel towards more successful authors, about current debates over cultural appropriation and “who can tell this story” that pervade the literary world, about identity, and about the terrifying roller coaster that social media can take a person on, where they’re idolized one day and “cancelled” the next.

In case there’s any question about it, the author makes it perfectly clear that June absolutely deserves to get cancelled. There’s no ambiguity here, no mixed motive that we can sort-of justify, even though with a first-person narrator, the reader has a ringside seat as June manages to justify it to herself. She straight-up steals another author’s work, not once but twice, dodges numerous opportunities to be honest about what she’s done, and richly deserves her eventual comeuppance (or comedownance, which should be a word).

In fact, standing back from it after the wild ride of reading it, my one criticism of this novel is that June is too much of a cartoon villain. Almost any writer can empathize with the jealousy she feels over the way her friend’s career has skyrocketed (especially as they’re not really close friends, more “two young writers who went to the same university and have kinda stayed in touch”). But from the moment June makes the decision to pass off the hybrid of Athena’s novel and her own edits as entirely her own, it becomes impossible (for me, anyway) to empathize with her at all; both the wrongness of what she’s doing and the stupidity of thinking she can get away with it make her more of a caricature than a real flesh and blood person, to me.

I think the deeper topics Kuang is exploring here would be more interesting if June were a more rounded and believable character – as it is, she’s too easy to write off, too easy for the reader to say “Well, I’d never do something like that.” But it definitely makes for a compelling and hard-to-put-down story.

Really Good, Actually, by Monica Heisey

This was a book I enjoyed much more than I expected to. The character is both self-destructive and self-pitying in ways I usually find difficult to read about, but for some reason there was enough wry, self-aware humour in the chronicle of a young divorcee navigating the first year after her break-up, that I was able to empathize at least a little with her even while she’s in the middle of making such obviously terrible choices. I read this in one day and found it surprisingly engaging.

Our Hideous Progeny, by C.E. McGill

The hook for this historical novel is that Mary, the main character, is the great-niece of Victor Frankenstein who finds her late great-uncle’s papers, learns of his great experiment, and becomes interested in trying to create life for herself. Really, though, the Frankenstein connection is not the most important part of the novel. For me, it was much more a novel about a woman trying to make her name as a scientist amid the great scientific discoveries of the mid-19th century (in that way it reminded me a bit of Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, though it’s not as strong a novel). The frustration of a woman who can only gain entry to the world of science through connection to a man — a man who can never fully appreciate her — is what lingers me in this story, far more than Mary’s experiments with her own “Creature.”

Nettle and Bone, by T. Kingfisher

Having enjoyed Kingfisher’s novel A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking (and the podcast conversation I had with my friend Christine about it), I picked up her latest, Nettle and Bone, when I saw it at a good sale price, and I’m so glad I did. I liked it even more than Wizard’s Guide.

As with Wizard’s Guide, the heroine of Nettle and Bone is a reluctant and unlikely heroine, pulled against her will into saving — well, not the world, or even a whole kingdom, but saving her sister from a horrible marriage to an evil prince. Marra is the youngest and least impressive of three princesses; she’s sent to a convent as a young woman, and is relatively content there until she decides she’s the one who has to step up and do what nobody else has, even if it’s to benefit a sister who never seemed to like her all that much.

I liked Marra as a main character, and I particularly liked the unlikely cast of characters she assembles around her as she travels — a grumpy witch, a hesitant fairy godmother, an enslaved warrior, a possessed chicken, and a dog assembled from the bones of dead dogs. They’re a wonderful band of unlikely misfits, and I found myself caring a lot about whether they all made it to the end of the story alive. I won’t tell you whether they all do, because if you like quirky, quiet, funny fantasy novels at all, you should just read this yourself.

The Lies that Bind, by Emily Giffin

This one was kind of a so-so book for me. It’s set in New York City in the summer of 2001, when Cecily, an aspiring journalist in her late 20s, is still reeling from a breakup with Matt. Then she meets Grant in a bar and begins a whirlwind romance that doesn’t seem quite real. Is it real? Is anything about the enigmatic but nearly perfect Grant real, or is he hiding something? And then, as inevitable as the book about the eruption of Pompeii that I just read, 9/11 hits, and everything changes in unexpected ways.

I didn’t connect a whole lot with Cecily as a main character — her personality seemed a little ill-defined — and I didn’t really get invested in either Matt or Grant as romantic leads, though for much of the book Cecily is genuinely torn between them. The book is titled The Lies that Bind, so you clearly know it’s going to be a book where a lot of the plot is going to hinge on people lying to each other, but even so it’s annoying to read about plot complications that could so simply be avoided with a little basic honesty. Overall, this romance didn’t grab me as much as I’d hoped it would.