Skipshock, by Caroline O’Donoghue

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Having read and loved Caroline O’Donoghue’s novel The Rachel Incident (which you can also hear me going on about on my podcast), I decided to give her fantasy novel a go. Skipshock is categorized as YA fantasy, but apart from the two main characters being in their late teens, there’s nothing that for me really distinguished it from fantasy written for adult readers: the worldbuilding is as complex and the stakes as high as in any adult fantasy.

Skipshock is a world-crossing fantasy novel (fantasy, but with what I’d consider some sci-fi elements also) in which Margo, a young Irish girl on a train on her way to boarding school suddenly gets jolted into a parallel world in which she is also riding on a train and meets Moon, a young travelling salesman. Moon lives in a universe of interconnected worlds where some people are able to travel from world to world, but the means of travel is strictly controlled by those in the richer and more comfortable worlds. Margot falls in with a group of freedom fighters who are trying to win back the right to travel freely between worlds and believe that her ability to cross from a previously unknown world might offer a key to opening the routes between worlds once again.

This was an engrossing novel in which, as I got near the end, I started to get that uneasy feeling that there was no way the story could be wrapped up in the remaining pages. And sure enough, it turns out Skipshock, just recently released, is “the first in a planned duology” so I will have to wait a year or more to find out what happens to Margo and Moon. But I think it will be worth the wait.

The Impossible Fortune, by Richard Osman

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This fifth installment in the beloved Thursday Murder Club series is a worthy addition to the collection. In fact, I found this more fun to read as the mystery was a little less convoluted than it has been in some of the past books. There’s still lots of emphasis on character and setting as much as on plot, which is one of the delights of this series for me. This book is the first one released after the original book in the series was made into a Netflix movie, and there’s a sly joke inserted here as a nod to people who complained about a specific casting choice in the movie, along with lots of other gentle humour. I really enjoyed this book.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs

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This was a book I picked up for research purposes and I didn’t actually read all of it, only the chapters relevant to what I was writing about, but it’s a very interesting piece of historical writing (intended more for the scholar than the general reader, but not entirely inaccessible to general readers). Essentially, it’s about how the roles of white and Black women in colonial Virginia became more clearly defined as English settlement and African slavery there became more entrenched, and how it was in the interest of the white male men who ruled the colony — those “anxious” patriarchs” to define white and Black versions of feminine experience almost in opposition to each other, so that neither could be an effective threat to the power of white, Christian, English men.

Weyward, by Emilia Hart

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Weyward is a triple-timeline novel about three women in the same family line with a heritage of nature magic/witchcraft in their DNA. Seventeenth-century Altha is on trial for witchcraft; Violet, a teenager at the beginning of WW2, is hemmed in by her father’s narrow expectations of what a woman’s life can be; twenty-first century Kate is fleeing an abusive marriage. While these women don’t know their history or the power of their family connection, each finds refuge in the same location — a cottage on the outskirts of an English village — and learns to use her power and break free of the restrictions that bind her. A nice feminist fantasy: I found Violet’s story the most powerful and affecting of the three.

The Paris Express

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A very short, almost terse, “bottle episode” of a novel, Emma Donoghue’s latest book imagines the hours leading up to one of the most famous train disasters in early rail history (famous because of the photograph of it, not because of a huge death toll or anything). Peopling her train cars with a mix of real historical figures who are known to have been on that train, real historical figures who weren’t but plausibly might have been, and a few wholly fictional characters, Donoghue brings this tiny slice of space and time to life with her trademark vivid style.

The Homemade God, by Rachel Joyce

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In The Homemade God, four adult siblings have to confront their relationships with their elderly father, who raised them as a single parent in a fairly chaotic household, and with one another. The triggering event is that Aging Dad, who is an artist of minimal talent but a fair degree of wealth and fame, has suddenly fallen in love with a woman who is younger than any of his children and who none of them have met. When he marries her, takes her away to the family villa in Italy, and shortly thereafter dies under mysterious circumstances, his family, naturally worried, converges on the villa to try to understand what happened. Along the way, all of them end up confronting not just their father’s widow but themselves and the ways in which their father, the “homemade god” of the title, has cast such a long shadow over all their lives. The ending of this book really moved me, which is a pretty high tribute from me.

Grown Ups, by Marian Keyes

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I recently realized I had never read anything by Marian Keyes even though she ticks a lot of my “favourite writer” boxes (Irish, writes sad/funny/hopeful novels about women and families, was hilarious on a podcast I listened to recently) so I picked up Grown Ups and it was a great place to start with her body of work. The novel traces a few months in the lives of the extended Casey family, who are a network of dysfunctions, lies, and secrets — all of which of course come spilling out in an unguarded moment, leading to both hilarity and heartbreak.

I really enjoyed this book and have moved on to other Marian Keyes books which no doubt you will be hearing about in due course.

Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler

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Three Days in June provides us with a classic and satisfying Anne Tyler setup. A middle-aged divorced woman, Gail, has to survive the weekend of her daughter’s wedding while navigating a sudden job loss, her own social awkwardness, her relationship with her daughter, and, most significantly, the unexpected necessity to spend the weekend under the same roof as her ex-husband Max, who has arrived expecting to crash at Gail’s place and also bringing a rescue cat in need of a foster home. (Gail does not want a cat, nor does she want Max). As the weekend with its tensions unfolds, so does the backstory of Gail’s life and her marriage to Max, leading to a conclusion that feels (to me, anyway) unforeseen but also just right.

Permanent Astonishment: A Memoir, by Tomson Highway

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I’m not sure what to say about this book. It’s brilliantly written, a wonderful story of Indigenous childhood and joy in rural Manitoba in the 1960s that plays with languages in a wonderful way and was a delight to listen to as an audiobook. And yet, it took me ages to get through the audiobook — while it was enjoyable listening, I never found it compelling.

Also as a settler-descended Canadian, it was odd to listen to a book by an acclaimed Indigenous author in which he writes about his years in residential school in a mostly positive way. It’s not that Highway is unaware of or unaffected by the harms done in the residential school system, but he chooses to focus on the way in which it opened doors to him for further education and his future career, and most of the stories he tells about his school days are funny or heartwarming ones about his fellow students.

This is an unexpected perspective, but obviously any Indigenous person has the right to tell their own story in whatever way works for them, and as the title implies, Tomson Highway, while acknowledging the hardships and discrimination forced upon Indigenous people in Canada, chooses to frame this particular book around Indigenous joy — “permanent astonishment” at the beauty of the land, the joy and resilience of the Cree, Dene, and Metis people he grew up among, and the liveliness and power of the Cree language.

Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North, by Rachel Joyce

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It took me a long time to get to reading this book after The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessey, but Maureen’s journey (by car, not on foot) from the south to the north of England to see her son’s memorial and try to come to terms with her decades-old grief and with the fallout of Harold’s long and strange journey. This novel provides a poignant and beautiful completion to the trilogy, giving the third of these three senior citizens whose lives are all touched by a young man’s death, a story as complex and thought-provoking as the others. I love all these books.