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.

The Fake, by Zoe Whittall

Zoe Whittall’s The Fake was a very engaging and hard-to-put down novel about two people, Shelby and Gibson, who both get scammed by the same con artist, a young woman named Cammie who uses (mostly, but not entirely) made-up stories of her own past trauma to latch onto people who are grieving and alone. For Shelby, mourning the untimely death of her wife, Cammie is the new best friend who gives her some hope and purpose; for recently-divorced Gibson, she’s the woman who re-ignites passion and maybe even true love. When both Shelby and Gibson start realizing that elements of Cammie’s story aren’t adding up, they find each other and compare notes. It’s the end of that particular road for Cammie — but just as easily as she came into their lives, she can slip out again, finding new marks. I’ve seen people argue that the ending of this book is anticlimactic, but I think it’s probably just realistic — there isn’t always a bit, dramatic climax to the story of a scammer like Cammie. Grifters gonna grift, and ordinary people who’ve been fooled by them just have to pick up the pieces and move on.

Come and Get It, by Kiley Reid

Once again, Kiley Reid writes a witty, vivid, fun and insightful novel about issues of class, race, and power imbalances between women. As in Such a Fun Age, this novel is essentially about a relationship between an older, more financially stable white woman and a younger Black woman with a more precarious financial situation. In Come and Get It, the backdrop is an American university, where Amanda, a writer, gets a gig as visiting professor while researching a book on young women’s attitudes towards weddings. She quickly forms an alliance with Millie, a personable and ambitious young woman who works as a resident assistant in one of the dorms while finishing her own degree. While the story focuses mainly on Millie’s and Amanda’s relationship, there’s also a fascinating web of other characters, mostly the young women who live in the residence hall. As in her previous book, Reid has a sharp eye for personality and a sharp ear for dialogue. The pacing of the book feels slow at first, like this is just going to be a kind of “slice of life” story where not a lot happens (which honestly would be fine because the voice and characterization are so engaging) but when the plot picks up in the last third of the novel things start to unravel quickly and the book becomes (became for me at least) hard to put down. I think Kiley Reid is one of the best writers chronicling the lives of young American women today. Loved this book.

Pompeii, by Robert Harris

After reading Elodie Harper’s The Temple of Fortuna a couple of months ago, I was interested to pick up another novel, from about 20 years ago, also about the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii. Harris’s novel is much more tightly focused on the disaster itself, covering just the days immediately before and after Vesuvius erupts. The main character is an engineer working on the aqueduct, who starts investigating why water has stopped flowing to some of the towns near Pompeii. As the time ticks away to the disaster that all the readers know is coming but the characters are unaware of, the suspense lies in seeing which of the characters will survive and for those who do, how their lives will be changed. I found this vivid, engaging and informative.

Everyone on This Train is a Suspect, by Benjamin Stevenson

Everyone on This Train is a Suspect continues the main character and premise of Stevenson’s last novel, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. In that book, the hapless Ernest Cunningham, who has never written a mystery novel but has written a series of how-to books instructing other writers on how to construct mysteries, finds himself in the midst of a series of gruesome deaths during a family reunion in a remote ski resort. Having lived through and solved that mystery and written about it in a best-selling book, Ernest is now invited to an exclusive event for mystery writers and fans, held aboard a luxury train crossing Australia from north to south. You won’t be surprised to learn that one of the writers is murdered, or that Ernest tries to solve the mystery and make it the basis for his next book, nor that he repeatedly breaks the fourth wall and discusses with the reader how these (allegedly) real-life events are following the rules of good mystery writing. You won’t be surprised by any of that, but if you liked the first book, you’ll enjoy this journey too.