Review: He Said/She Said by Erin Kelly

Rating 3/5

(An average of 1/5 for the first two thirds of the book, 4/5 for the last third)

Warning: This post will contain BIG SPOILERS, so if you don’t want to find them out please stop here. Also be advised that this book covers a rape trial, and the issues of consent and emotional manipulation/abuse, so if you find any of these themes distressing you may also wish to stop here.

I thought I knew where this book was going. So much so that I didn’t want to attend this month’s meeting of Gloucester Book Club to discuss it. In a book that is a good 100 pages too long, the latter third was disturbing enough for me to grab for my chromebook and write about it almost as soon as I was done.

We begin with the He and She of the book’s title, a young couple called Kit and Laura, who exchange narratives across a period of time, from a solar eclipse they both witnessed in 1999, to a present day eclipse, in 2015. Kit is travelling to the Faroe Islands to see this one alone, leaving pregnant wife Laura alone at home in London. Kit is obsessed with solar eclipses, so the couple aim to both see as many as they can throughout the years they spend together, but the narrative event that really ties the two time points together is the Laura and Kit’s interruption of a rape at an eclipse festival in 1999, and its subsequent fallout, which culminates during the solar eclipse weekemd of 2015.

The subject of the assault, Beth, is presented as the ‘mad woman in the attic’, after she follows Kit and Laura to London after her rape trial and starts lingering around their home. We are led to believe that, like Bertha Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Beth Taylor is a wronged woman whose madness and instability ultimately lead to her create a devastating fire that wounds the male hero and destroys his home irrevocably. The difference in He Said/She Said is that Kit scalds his hand on a burning doorknob as he rescues Laura from their burning flat in Clapham Common, and Beth doesn’t jump to her death from the flaming roof…but more on that later.

As a result, Laura led to believe that the woman she once sought to help after a sexual assault now has a crazed vendetta against her, calling into question the very idea that what the couple witnessed at Lizard Point Festival in 1999 was in fact an interrupted rape, and not some part of a damaged woman’s mind games. This is the point of the novel I had reached when I was due to attend my book club meeting, and, as I imagine Laura would be, I am not to be dissuaded from the idea that sexual consent should, and can be, withdrawn at any time and still remain valid, and so was not keen on the idea of discussing a book that took nearly 200 pages to muddy this water.

Before I get on to the turning point of the novel, I just wanted to give kudos to Erin Kelly for her realistic portrayal of Laura’s anxiety attacks. Other than Laura’s initial feeling of her arms being trailed by ‘gossamer’, (which I find far too lovely a description for such a hellish feeling), Kelly’s unflinching references to Laura’s repeated arm scratching, for me, accurately depict not only how visceral the psychosomatic feelings of an anxiety attack can feel, but also how easily self-harm can become a coping strategy for the subject without them even being aware it.

So, to the revelation that changed the book for me…or, if you’ll pardon the pun, eclipsed where I thought the original plot was going. (Come on, I couldn’t not go for that one!)

The fact that Kit (with her consent) slept with Beth the night before she was raped, made her lie about this at her trial, cut his own foot, set fire to his own flat and then hide this all from his wife for the next 15 years, to the detriment of her career, as well as mental and physical health, all to protect himself and his relationship with Laura, continues to astound me more than any of the physical assaults the rapist Jamie carries out in the course of the novel. This isn’t to say that one type of assault is greater than the other, or one type of abuser more valid than the next, but rather how much I am still shocked at how normalised the narrative of female hysteria is, to the point that I didn’t see this twist coming until it was revealed.

For all the advances we have made since the days of Jane Eyre, Kelly’s unsettling story has made me wonder why as a society we still see emotional and psychological abuse as a woman’s domain, the feminised reaction to the comparatively male weapons of physical violence and rape, when in reality, far too many people learn to their detriment that any form of abuse isn’t gender specific. He Said/She Said reveals an unsettling truth too about the secrecy of abuse within romantic relationships, that, before revealed, the lover’s role as abuser can seem to the victim as unfathomable as the moon blocking out the sun. Yet as we know, these events do, and will, keep continuing to happen.

Review: The Ruby in The Smoke by Phillip Pullman

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Rating 3/5

This review has been a long time coming, and not just because I finished this book in the middle of last month and have only just gotten around to writing about it. The Ruby in the Smoke, and the rest of the Sally Lockhart series, played a prominent feature on my childhood bookhelf, along with Phillip Pullman’s Northern Lights Trilogy, and to my shame I never finished any of them. Although Pullman’s novels are often aimed at the late childhood/young adult market, I’ve only truly begun to appreciate his storytelling as an adult. The Ruby in the Smoke never panders to its younger audience, nor shields them from a series of gruesome and unusual deaths, drug use and addiction, ranging in locations from the seediest underbelly of Victorian London and the furthest reaches of the British Empire. Sally’s world is revealed at a breakneck speed, which leaves you little time to reflect in the novel’s 207 pages. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel that adult readers are rarely treated to such a crisp slice of Neo-Victorianism, as the contemporary adult historical fiction market favours the epics of The Essex Serpent to the succinct brevity of description achieved by Pullman in this novel.

Indeed, it was strange, and did strike me at first as childish, to see Pullman write on many occasions about what was going to happen, directly before it happens, as a way of tantalising readers to carry on. By the second paragraph we have met the novel’s protagonist Sally Lockhart and know that ‘within fifteen minutes she [is] going to kill a man’ (pg 7). I read that sentence over and over as a child, knowing that something exciting was about to happen, but yet somehow still not being able to get any further than that line. This time though, I persevered, knowing that this couldn’t be entirely true of our heroine, and was not disappointed to see how events in the first chapter actually did turn out after all these years.

I began to realise as the novel progressed that it’s the unwavering nature of Sally’s good character (I use term loosely, although always morally just, she isn’t above a criminal act or ten), her strong determinism juxtaposed against murky world she inhabits, that is the key ingredient to anchor the reader into a story of so many different subplots and mysteries as The Ruby in the Smoke is.

Although I was pleasantly surprised to have not guessed the biggest twist in Sally’s story, the real events behind the traumatic nightmares from her childhood, I had to bring this book down from my original rating of 4/5 due to the sheer number of implausible things that happen in the last twenty pages or so. I feel like Pullman could have done with another chapter or two to tie up all the loose ends suitably, by giving the revelation Sally’s history longer to unfurl like the opium smoke that triggers her memory, rather than just bouncing from one shock to another like the stories in the pulp magazines that Sally’s young charge Jim devours.

Despite this, The Ruby in the Smoke was an enjoyable bit of childhood nostalgia for me, and I’ll be looking out for the rest of the series at second hand book shops in the future (I feel like the prize is just that much sweeter if you can find the exact edition you would have had from the time, rather than the latest reprint!).

Are there any books that you were meant to read in your childhood that you’d like to give a second chance now? Let me know what you think! Zoe x

What happened to Zoe Reads? (plus a sneaky review of The Lido by Libby Page)

August 31, 2019Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

If you’ve recently liked my page on Facebook, welcome to Zoe Reads! As you may have seen, my blog has been very quiet lately, having not really posted any reviews since before the start of summer.

Initially the reason for this is that I wanted to focus more of my time on a charity walk challenge, which I took part in at the end of June 2019. I have been reading still throughout this time (I’ve read or listened to about 25 books since the start of the year), however I’ve been feeling a niggling sense of self-doubt that also led me to quit a few of my regular Gloucester Book Club meetings until recently too. I lost the fun and the sense of purpose I had started to feel when reading and reviewing books online and in my face-to-face group. The whole experience felt flat and there’d be weeks before I’d even think of picking up a book.

It all started when I was reading May’s pick for the club – The Lido by Libby Page. The book is lovely, with some fantastic character studies and a strong sense of community spirit throughout. I initially gave the book 4/5 because it was a great holiday read, and I had the pleasure of reading it beside a pool in Majorca. I should have been happy…

…and yet…

turns out I was triggered into a massive anxiety spiral by what has described as

The most uplifting, feel-good summer read of the year

(source: https://biblio.co.uk/book/lido-most-uplifting-feel-good-summer/d/1108694829).

Oh the irony.

This is because Page’s depiction of anxiety in her protagonist Kate was so spot-on, it forced me to take a look at my wellbeing and realise much was lacking. As Kate spirals through one particularly intense panic attack in a shop changing room in London, I couldn’t help but think of similar times when I’d teared up in public for no apparent reason, yet felt like the world was crashing down inside.

Like Kate, I’m a 26 year old aspiring writer from the Westcountry, who struggles with self-esteem and anxiety issues. My favourite anecdote of the whole novel comes when Kate remembers introducing herself to her MA Journalism class as being from Bristol and liking cider, from each of them to immediately launch into a list of all their publications and achievements. I resonated with that very deeply, and it still makes me laugh now, because this sense of being completely out of my depth was ultimately what put me off pursing journalism and creative writing further as a postgraduate.

Unlike Kate, (spoiler alert here for those of you who still want to read the book), I have not gotten the job at The Guardian, the London flat, and the stable, loving boyfriend at the end of my self-care rainbow. I always thought my dislike of chick-lit as a genre was due to some internalised misogyny that books about women and their love lives aren’t as worthy for serious literary consideration (and maybe it still is to a certain extent), but also the problem I had with The Lido and other ‘feel-good’ books is that they don’t actually make me feel good. At all. Once consumed, they make me feel like crap for not achieving even a small part what my fictional peers do. I know romantic heroines are idealised as hell, but surely I can’t be the only person that has this problem of being jealous of fictional characters and their happy endings? Happy endings in fiction give hope, yet “sometimes hope can be the most painful thing”, says Page in The Lido. Hope is painful in this context because it can also magnify the absence of thing you hope for, whether that’s the safety of your local lido, or just a sense of love and purpose in your own life.

I’m starting to realise that not to being able to achieve any of the heteronormative goals of perfect career, marriage, and family is not a judgement on your worth as person, but honestly it’s taken me a few months of not reading and going through some difficult times to gain this perspective.

If I could have rewritten the ending The Lido to make it a 5/5, I would have liked it to have been a little more realistic as to where Kate ends up within the space of a year, (none of the journos I know can afford to live in London with just their partners for a start) and kept Rosemary alive, because she was undoubtedly the lifeblood of the whole story, and once she died my interest in the story left.

Other than that, I’m in a better frame of mind now so will hopefully be posting a lot more reviews here soon. Also, if anyone would like to prove me wrong about happy endings with some genuinely feel-good book recommendations, I’d love to hear them!

Zoe x

Review: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

March 17, 20192 Comments

Rating: 1/5

Even an accidental perfume spillage couldn’t save this book for me

My first blog review encounters a serious hiccup – what happens when you really don’t like a book you’ve read and don’t know why?

I persevered with Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend as it was the choice for this month at my local book club. Even so, this is a book I’d had on my radar for a while, as contemporary female fiction is usually my thing (presuming Elena Ferrante really is a woman as her pseudonym suggests – no one really knows). I’m not daunted by reading a translated book either, and would even like to read more. So why was this much lauded book 331 pages of sheer torture for me?

I hoped that attending the Gloucester Book Club meeting would help solidify some of my thoughts. The meeting was great as always, with questions and context to help draw out our responses to the story. We learnt about some of the history of Naples where the book is set, (although for me the adage ‘see Naples and die’ took a new meaning when slogging through this book!) and I was encouraged to hear that everyone had struggled with the book’s dense sentences and provincial plot initially. However, unlike me, each other member had had their ‘aha!’ moment at some point in the book, when they became intoxicated with Ferrante’s storytelling, and even looked forward to reading or hearing about the next three (!) books in her Neopolitan quartet. It was said that listening to the audiobook or watching the recent HBO adaptation of the novels helped other members fall in love with the world of Lila and Lenu, but based on how I felt about the novel itself I’m not willing to risk it.

: The cover was the most interesting thing about this book, and even that was dull

What was missing for me in this book was ironicially what the narrating character Lenu discovers for herself more and more as the novel progresses, both in pursuit of academic excellence, and also most vividly whilst reading on the beaches of Ischia, where she feels as if she’s “dissolving into the pages like a jellyfish” (pg 281). Although I see a lot of myself in Lenu, and can empathise with the conflict of love versus envy when compared next to ‘brilliant’ female friends in a patriarchal world that only allows a set amount of space for women, I feel like Ferrante keeps telling us that My Brilliant Friend will be an important coming-of-age story without actually substantiating that claim with a sustained narrative interest beyond a few beautifully crafted passages.

The only moment that really melted my heart (and saved the book from a 0 star rating!) comes when Lenu is bathing Lila in preparation for her wedding. The two girls are still only 16, but Lenu broods like a scorned woman as she ceremoniously cleans her subject of her affections with as much adoration as she can, knowing that all her efforts will only lead to Lila’s future husband Stefano ‘sully[ing] her in the course of the night’ (pg 313). Lenu too feels that her high-school experience has been ‘sullied’ by the dawning realisation that no matter how much she studies, she will never truly experience the praise from their neighbourhood in the same way that Lila, the beautiful teenage virgin, is now experiencing through her wedding ritual.

The heartbreaking moment comes as Lila replies to Lenu’s dejected ‘thanks, but at a certain point school is over’ with ‘Not for you: you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls’ (pg 312). My heart breaks at the assumption that until that point in the book I had no doubt that Lila was the eponymous ‘brilliant friend’ of the title. The revelation that Lenu’s obsession is not a one-sided adolescent fantasy, but a mutual and reciprocated devotion, is a rare moment of tenderness that is glossed over again with wedding itself and the completely banal ending of the novel (spoiler: the big ending is the local big shot swans in wearing some shoes he’s not meant to have on. No – really).

I credit my study of literature at university for my ability to dissect a book at length, but also for my frustrating inability to like or dislike a book for with no obvious reason other than personal taste. When it’s been drummed in to you to back up every opinion with substantial evidence from the text for 4 years, reading and reviewing for pleasure afterwards is a difficult transition. What I will say about this book is the long sentences, overbearing detail, realism, moralistic tone, and extensive cast of characters in My Brilliant Friend reminded me of a Dickens novel. Whilst that might be high praise for many – I personally can’t stand a Dickens novel.

Are there any critically well-reviewed books that you wanted to like but actually struggled to enjoy? Please let me know in the comments section! Zoe x

Introduction – Ain’t no book like an audiobook

March 1, 2019March 1, 2019Leave a comment

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.” – Ernest Hemingway

I have a broad definition of reading. I often get asked as the youngest member of my local book club for the ‘Millenial’ opinion on things, and I think a lot of people would assume that us 18-35s would prefer not to read at all, as we’re far too busy on Snapchat taking selfies.

I have always loved reading in the traditional sense of having a physical book in front of you, but my consumption of stories has really taken off in the past couple of years since I moved to Gloucestershire. This is when I truly discovered the magic of audiobooks, thanks to the free use of the mobile library app BorrowBox that Gloucestershire Libraries provide to all their members. I have since also used Audible to get to a wider range of books I can’t wait to have, but for a free service, I couldn’t recommend BorrowBox enough. Existing Gloucestershire Library members just need to login with their borrower number and pin once you’ve downloaded the app.

It probably does help that I’ve always been an auditory learner, and would rather listen to music than watch TV. I can focus on an audiobook easily wherever I am and even up the narrator’s speed to 1.25-1.5x times faster than the preset to match my natural reading speed of around 60 pages an hour. But even so, to go from a robotic Hawkinesque voice of the first Kindle text to speech functions to this audiobook apps like these within under a decade has been nothing short of a revelation to me. I love the versatility of being able to press play on my book at any time, when I’m resting, on my commute, or even just mooching around the flat doing chores. I’m able to ‘read’ so much more thanks to audiobooks that I think it’s worth even the most cynical bibliophile having a look into alternative reading formats as a way to expand their reading capacities. There are still some books that are better digested in their physical form to get all the textual reference, such as inventive modern novels with elements of screenplay/theatre, such as Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed.

Like a true library, BorrowBox only lets one reader, (or I suppose listener), loan out a audiobook at any one time, for a duration of 2-3 weeks at a time. Loans can be ‘renewed’ for a maximum of 3 times, providing that no one else has reserved your book. That being said, there are a number of new releases regularly uploaded, so if you get in quick you can get to the latest must-read for free.

I’ve also read/listened to a lot of contemporary Australian fiction I wouldn’t have otherwise come across with Borrowbox being an Australian app. That means for those of you who have not come across the masterful writing of Richard Flanagan, who won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, there really is no excuse not sample the best of what the Antipodies has to offer.

Other BorrowBox highlights I’ve found so far include:

The Sleeper and The Spindle by Neil Gaiman – a kick-ass feminist fairytale reboot from one of the best modern fantasy writers today.
Nutshell by Ian McEwan – Hamlet retold by an unborn foetus. Weirdly compelling.
The Unforgotten Coat by Frank Cotterell Boyce – A bittersweet coming of age story about immigration and embracing other cultures from a Liverpuddlian child’s perspective.
The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera – Made also made into an award-winning film, Ihimaera’s powerful Maori fable about family, tradition, and the struggle between embracing the modern world whilst paying due respect to the past.

So to surmise, I won’t just be reviewing audiobooks, but undoubtedly they will be making a regular appearance on this blog in between my other reviews and posts. They might not be for you, but my message is that if you love stories, don’t be a format snob just for the sake of being a purist – you could be missing out on your next favourite read!