Three Recommended July Releases
Here are three enjoyable reads due out next month that I was lucky enough to get a hold of early. These are all first books by women authors, with subjects ranging from twentieth-century artists to a parent’s dementia. I’ve pulled 200–250-word extracts from my full reviews and hope you’ll be tempted by one or more of these.
The Velveteen Daughter by Laurel Davis Huber
(Coming on July 11th from She Writes Press)
The name Margery Williams Bianco might not seem familiar, but chances are you remember her classic children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit. This lovely debut novel is about Margery and her daughter, Pamela Bianco, a painter and child prodigy troubled by mental illness. The main thread of the novel is set on one day in 1944, and the first-person narration alternates between Margery and Pamela, who through memory and imagination drift back through vivid scenes from their lives in Turin, London, Wales, and New York City.
Themes of creativity, mental health and motherhood are nestled in this highly visual book full of cameos by everyone from Pablo Picasso to Eugene O’Neill. I love reading fictional biographies of writers and other creative types, and this one gives such an interesting window onto lesser-known twentieth-century figures. I especially appreciated Huber’s endnotes explaining what was fact (almost everything) and what was fiction here, and her discussion of the letters and archives she used.
As The Velveteen Rabbit teaches, we truly come to life when we are loved, and you can see how for Pamela it was a lifelong struggle to be loved for who she was. The artist’s tortured journey and the mother’s tender worry are equally strong. Had I finished it a few days earlier I would have included this in my write-up of the best books of 2017 so far. It would be a great choice for book clubs, too – a set of questions is even included at the end of the novel.
A favorite line (Pamela describes her mother): “Mam’s eyes are vast almond-shaped seas, liquid navy, flowing with an endless depth of understanding and compassion.”
Readalike: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler
My thanks to publicist Caitlin Hamilton Summie for granting me early access via NetGalley.
My rating: 
Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong
(Coming on July 11th from Henry Holt and Co. [USA]; already available from Scribner UK)
Reeling from a broken engagement, Ruth Young returns to her childhood home in California for a year to help look after her father, who has Alzheimer’s. She tries feeding Howard every half-cracked dementia health cure (cruciferous vegetables are a biggie) and, with his teaching assistant, Theo, maintains the illusion that her father is still fit to teach by gathering graduate students for a non-credit History of California class that meets in empty classrooms and occasionally off-campus – wherever they can be away from the watchful eye of Dean Levin.
As these strategies fail and Howard’s behavior becomes ever more erratic, Ruth realizes the best thing she can do is be a recorder of daily memories, just as Howard was for her when she was a little girl: “Here I am, in lieu of you, collecting the moments” – “Today you…”
This is a delightfully quirky little book, in the same vein as Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen. I marked out a bunch of funny metaphors:
This morning’s [hangover] is a rodent: pesky but manageable.
It was grotesque, the way I kept trying to save that relationship. Like trying to tuck an elephant into pants.
The moon, tonight, looks like a cut zucchini coin.
But you may well read this with a lump in your throat, too. From one Christmas to the next, we see how much changes for this family – a reminder that even though the good times are still worth celebrating, they’re gone before you know it.
Readalike: Not Working by Lisa Owens
My rating: 
A Beautiful, Terrible Thing: A Memoir of Marriage and Betrayal by Jen Waite
(Coming on July 11th from Plume Books [USA] and Prentice Hall Press [UK])
Jen Waite had been in New York City pursuing her dream of becoming an actress for two years when she started working at a restaurant for extra cash. It was here that she met Marco Medina, a handsome Argentinian bar manager, and they fell head-over-heels in love. All the clichés: a green card, a successful business venture, a baby on the way, an idyllic wedding on the beach in Maine. And then the whole thing fell apart. “Marco was always an illusion; the best magic trick I’ve ever seen,” Waite marvels.
She’s written her story up like a thriller, full of gradual revelations and the desire to get even. Chapters alternate between “Before,” when she still had what she thought was the perfect existence, and “After,” when she started to suspect that Marco had a secret life. I use the term “thriller” as a compliment: the dialogue is spot-on and this is a remarkably gripping book given that the title and blurb pretty much give the whole game away. More than that, it’s a fascinating psychological study of the personality of a sociopath and pathological liar. Surviving to tell her story and perhaps train to become a therapist for women who have been in her situation is Waite’s apt revenge.
Readalike: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
My rating:
Have you read any July releases that you would recommend?
2015 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,000 times in 2015. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.
The Seed Collectors & The A to Z of You and Me
The Seed Collectors by Scarlett Thomas
“I have no idea why everyone thinks nature is so benign and glorious and wonderful. All nature is trying to do is kill us as efficiently as possible.”
This offbeat novel about obsession, sex and inheritance is set in Kent in 2011 and stars an extended family of botanists. The concept of a family tree has a more than usually literal meaning here given the shared surname is Gardener and most members are named after plants. We have Great-Aunt Oleander, recently deceased; cousin Bryony and her children Holly and Ash; siblings Charlie and Clem (short for Clematis); and half-sister Fleur, who has taken over Oleander’s yoga center, Namaste House. The generation in between was virtually lost, perhaps to a plant-based drug overdose, on a seed collecting expedition to the South Pacific. Oleander has left each motherless child one of these possibly deadly seed pods.
Did I mention the book is saturated with sex? Incest, adultery, illegitimate children, S&M, Internet porn, you name it. But beyond that, the metaphorical language is highly sexualized – bursting with seeds, fertility and genital-like plants. I can’t think when I’ve encountered such oversexed vocabulary since D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Here’s a sampling:
Dave seems to be avoiding the clouds as he works the little plane up into the sky, penetrating it slowly, and really quite gently.
A surprising amount of plants look like dicks.
(of peat) It’s like walking on a giant’s pubes.
All lettuce wants is sex. And violence. Just like all plants. It wants to reproduce, and it wants to kill or damage its rivals so they don’t reproduce.
So many flowers are basically little sex booths.
And she was pulling him towards her, deeper into her, as if he were a flower and she an insect desperate for his cheap, sugary nectar.
Connections between characters morph and take on new dimensions as the book goes on. A few characters are unrealized, such as Fleur, which meant I felt slightly disconnected from them. (My ‘favorite’ in a book stuffed full of unlikable figures was probably Bryony, whose hunger for food, alcohol and shopping seems to be endless.) Likewise, not all the storylines are truly essential, so the book seems aimless for its final third; it definitely could have been shorter and tied together better, perhaps with some flashbacks to the previous generation’s experiences on the island to make the past feel more alive. The spiritual element remains vague, although there is a pleasant touch of magic realism along the way.
Despite these reservations, I truly enjoyed Thomas’s unusual writing. She moves freely between characters’ perspectives but also inserts odd second-person asides asking philosophical questions about wasted time and what is truly important in life. One peculiar little section even imagines the point-of-view of a robin in the garden of Namaste House, with made-up words fit for “The Jabberwocky”: “The man is, as always, incompt and untrig. He sloggers around his rooms in his black and grey ragtails like an elderly magpie.”
I like the range of questions you’re left with as a reader: Is nature malicious? Can we overcome our addictions? How much of who we are is down to our parentage? Does life really just come down to sex? The content of the novel might be reminiscent of A.S. Byatt and Andrea Barrett’s science-infused fiction or The World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter, but the style is totally different. I can’t even think who it reminds me of; it feels pretty one of a kind to me. Luckily this is Thomas’s sixth novel, so there’s plenty more for me to explore.
With thanks to Canongate for the free copy, won in a Goodreads giveaway.
My rating: 
The A to Z of You and Me by James Hannah
Lying in a hospice bed, 40-year-old Ivo looks back on his life. Even after just four short decades and a modest career at a garden center, he has plenty to regret. Hard partying and drug use exacerbated his diabetes and prompted kidney failure. His lifestyle also led indirectly to his girlfriend, a nursing student named Mia (the “you” whom he often addresses directly), leaving him. He’s estranged from his sister and the friends he’d been close to since school days, especially Mal. How did he mess up so badly and cut himself off so completely that he’s now dying alone? And how much can he put right before he goes?
There’s plenty of affecting writing in Hannah’s debut novel, as in one of my favorite passages: “The sun chooses this moment to radiate through to me, through me. It feels like – it feels like life. I can sense my corrupt blood bubbling and basking beneath the surface.” I also love how Hannah captures the routines of institutional life – the sights, smells and sounds that come to define Ivo’s circumscribed life:
Round the corner now. Noticeboard up on the right, pinned every inch over with flyers and leaflets. The papers at the bottom lift and flutter in the convection of the heater beneath.
I am lost in a world of regular hums, distant beeping, the periodic reheating of the coffee machine in the corridor, and that steady kazoo [of his next-door neighbor’s breathing].
Nurse Sheila and Amber, the daughter of another hospice patient, are great supporting characters. Sheila’s A to Z game, encouraging Ivo to think of a memory attached to body parts starting with each letter of the alphabet, provides a hokey but effective structure. As Ivo’s condition deteriorates and his thoughts are scrambled by morphine, his narration gradually becomes less coherent and more insular. This means that by the time we reach the conclusion (which somehow manages to be both predictable and shocking at the same time), we aren’t sure whether he’s giving a reliable account of events or imagining things.
Ultimately, I felt confused about what Hannah meant for the book to be. Is this Irvine Welsh lite? Or a Rachel Joyce style tear-jerker? It’s similar in setup to The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, you see, and the remembered relationship with Mia is rather sappy. However, keep in mind that in British English the letter Z is pronounced ‘zed’, so the title doesn’t rhyme, which keeps it from being overly twee. Another barrier to my appreciation of the novel was that I never understood why Ivo was dying. People don’t die of kidney failure nowadays, thanks to dialysis and transplantation. (I have a kidney disease, so I should know!)
I’d recommend this book to fans of Mark Haddon, David Nicholls and Donal Ryan. I’ll follow Hannah’s career and hope he can avoid melodrama and a contrived structure – the two near-pitfalls of this one – in the future.
With thanks to Transworld Books for the free copy, won in a Goodreads giveaway.
My rating: 
Welcome!
At the end of July 2013, I left my job as a library assistant to set up as a freelance book reviewer. For just over a year and a half, then, I’ve been writing reviews and other book-related articles on a self-employed basis.
I nearly laughed aloud that summer when a friend introduced me with “This is Rebecca. She writes about books for a living.” It seemed ironic to me because, especially back then, I wasn’t ‘making a living,’ not by any stretch of the imagination. However, I’ve come to think about what I’m doing in a slightly different way. I might not be making a living as such, but I’m making a life – one based around books. I must never forget what a privilege that is.
I’ll be focusing on a number of different print and online writing venues (see my About page for a fairly comprehensive list). Recently I’ve also started editing academic journal articles; the work may be less creative, but it plays to my strengths of close observation and perfectionism in writing.
My goal with this blog is to make a shopfront for all my online writing as well as a place to post personal musings on recent books and the state of literature today. I’d be delighted for any of you who are interested to join me here and/or on Twitter: @bookishbeck. I also welcome friend requests from readers with similar tastes on Goodreads.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 