Hi everyone it's Lauren and welcome to part one of my May wrap-up, where I'm
going to be reviewing all of the books that I've read so far this month. The
first book I have to talk to you about today is The Trick to Time by Kit de
Waal. Now, this book was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. It was not
shortlisted and having read it to be honest I'm surprised it was long listed
at all. I've seen a lot of people who have really enjoyed this book,
but I really, really wasn't a fan and I say that as someone who really enjoyed
Kit de Waal's first book, My Name is Leon, I absolutely loved it
but this just left a little too much to be desired in my opinion. This is about a
woman called Mona who is from Ireland and she's living in the UK now and when
we meet her we learn that she's just about to turn 60 and that she makes
dolls for a living or there's a carpenter who makes dolls for her and
she makes the outfits for them and not only does she make dolls that people want
just for collections from orders from abroad, but she also makes specific
custom-made babies and to help people who have suffered a stillbirth and then
running concurrently with the present-day we also have Mona's story, so
we go back to her childhood and then her growing up and meeting her husband and
we have the threads coming together to see how she got to where she is in the
present day. Now,I loved the idea of the making of
the dolls and I was really interested in Mona in the present day, to be honest I
felt like there was just too much going on in this book and there were too many
threads of Mona's past. When we went back to her past and her meeting her husband
I just didn't care and I think the real issue with this book is that there's a
massive twist in here and there's lots of kind of revelations of what's been
going on in her past and I feel like the book really didn't focus on the really
important pieces of information, and because of that I just didn't feel like
I got emotionally invested in any of the characters really. There's a lot of stuff
with Mona and her dad and her mum back in Ireland and there's a whole
emotional story happening there and then there's the relationship between her and
her husband and their ups and downs and her husband's family, but you know there
was too much going on there and then her now with her friend Val and
what's going on in her in her present and she's meeting this new man and but
it was just too many threads of narrative and I just didn't feel like I
cared about any of them really, I feel like we didn't
spend enough time with each of these characters. There was also a kind of big
reveal right in the last page of a twist which I felt like was really obvious, so
again maybe that numbed me to the emotional experience of
the book but I was really, really disappointed in it. So I have not watched
anybody else's reviews of this book yet because I just wanted to say what I
thought without feeling like I'd been influenced by anybody else, so I would
actually like to discuss it with other people who like this book now, now that
I've done my review, because I don't I just don't I just don't really get it.
The next book I read luckily I liked very much indeed and that is Sing, Unburied, Sing
byJesmyn Ward and this has been shortlisted for the Women's
Prize for fiction and I think it might be one of my favorites on the shortlist
that I've read actually, I think it's very, very impressive. This story is
mainly told from two perspectives firstly we have Jojo who is a 13 year
old mixed-race boy in the u.s. and we also hear from his mother Leonie as
well and the main plot arc of the book is Leonie and Jojo and his little sister
Kayla and Leonie's friend Misty are going on a long car journey to go and pick up
um JoJo's father Michael who has been in prison, but hanging off of that narrative
is all of their own internal histories and stories. We get a lot of perspective
from JoJo's grandparents and their own histories and what they've gone through
in their lives and it's really a look at everybody being haunted by their past
and being trapped by their past and emotions and not being able to break
free from the cycle that they're going down and so this car journey in itself
is very claustrophobic and suffocating especially for the children and then
when you hear from Leonie's perspective you learn that she is struggling with a
drug addiction and really a kind of a very obsessive love with Michael because
they got together when they were very very young, she's still reeling from
grief of her younger brother who died when they were teenagers and what I
really, really enjoyed about this novel despite the fact that it's very well
written and the prose is so lyrical and beautiful but you I really felt a sense
of Jojo and Leonie being their own complete characters and JoJo's
perspective on his mum is full of anger and he he hates her because he doesn't
feel that she's a very good parent, he feels a lot closer to his
grandparents, and he really is taking a charge of looking after Kayla a lot of
the time, but then hearing from Leonie's perspective you do kind of empathize
with her even though she is technically a bad mother, you see that there is love
there and one part of the book that I really enjoyed is when kayla is not very
well and Leonie is trying to find a cure for her sickness, her car sickness,
and she's remembering all of the magical remedies and that the plant lore and the
herbs that her mother taught her and you can see that she has so much respect for
her mother and how good a mother she was to her and she she kind of has this
different perception of herself as a parent and she thinks that she can
then replicate that and do that for her children but she isn't capable of doing
that because she doesn't actually have the knowledge that her mother did and
she's so successful in writing these characters that it does enable you to if
not completely empathize and sympathize with every single person in this family
you at least really understand their motivations and where they're coming
from and all of the different tragedies that they are personally dealing with
But then she also takes you out of not just these characters own personal pain
and their personal grief and she's able to make a much wider point of the pain
and the horrors of racism in the south and the kind of histories experienced
by Jojo's grandfather and all of the histories of people who have gone
through torments and tortures because of their race and she uses
magical realism and some kind of theoretical and literal ghosts in here
but it never feels like it goes too far and when the magical realism occurs you
just kind of go with it even though it's you're not really expecting it and it
seems like a very naturalistic novel at first but it just builds so beautifully
and you just really get a sense of the large scale and the personal scale like
within this one family. So I just think it's it's so skillfully done and it's
the kind of thing where I didn't really realize how much I was enjoying the book
while I was reading it I was interested I was thinking yeah this is fine, I'd
gone through a kind of run of books I didn't really enjoy before picking this
one up but then I found myself not wanting to get off the train at my stop
because I was just really into it, even though it's only about a car journey
seemingly there's not this rip-roaring plot, I was really sucked in
with these characters and I really really enjoyed the reading process even
though some of what you're reading is quite harrowing. So I would absolutely
recommend this and thinking about it actually the other books on the Women's
Prize shortlist that I've read so far, I do feel like this is the most
skillfully accomplished like while you're reading it it just feels
effortless even though she's managed to pack so much in there. And finally we
have a little book of essays and that is Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca
Solnit and this is about maybe five or six essays, all of them have been
published before and the title essay, Men Explain Things to Me is the essay
from which was derived the term 'mansplaining', she doesn't actually use it
in this essay herself and but it was talking about her own personal
experience of meeting a man at a party at an event and where he tried to tell
her about a book that she had written herself who's going off and off about
this book and she's like 'yeah, that's my book, I wrote that, I'm an expert in that
field' and that's where this all took off from. This is my first time reading
Rebecca Solnit, I've heard amazing things about her writing and this was fine, I
don't really know how else to explain it, I think the problem with this collection
for me personally is that a lot of these essays were written and in 2013, in 2009,
it says when they were published in here, but some of them are just so current and
they're talking about things in the news such as the assault by Dominique
Strauss-Kahn of a woman working in his hotel and the subsequent case that
followed that, and it's not to say that what she's talking about in these essays
aren't still relevant but I think because they were written at the time
and they were reactionary it feels like as a reader you're meant to understand
exactly what event she's talking about and you know five six years later
sometimes I've forgotten details, and that's not to talk badly of the work
itself it's just that this collection perhaps is not as groundbreaking as each
of these essays individually would have been when they were first published.
There is one I say in here called Grandmother Spider and talking about
women in art and just women everywhere really and how they are kind of erased
and that was my favorite essay in here by far and it did sort of feel timeless
because she wasn't talking about current as such in that particular essay so I
would say if you're interested in reading feminist essays in general, if
you're interested in reading this specific essay, Men Explain Things to Me
and understand kind of the history of... 'the history'(!), but I guess understand some
of the movements and some of the terms in feminism over the last few years, then
this is quite an interesting starting point and kind of see what people were
writing only a few years ago, but if you are familiar with feminist thought, or
current feminist thought anyway, then these might seem a little bit outdated
to you so it's not like required reading I would say and but still very very good.
So that's it so far this month, I thought I would spend slightly longer
talking about the books I read since there was only three of them, rather
than do a very short video I thought I'd get into a little bit more depth, so I
hope that that was interesting for you. Let me know what you've been reading in
May so far and also let me know if you've read any of these, if you have any
opinions on them I'd love to have a chat with you in the comments, and I'll see
you my next video, bye!