The Maid - Nita Prose (2022)

When I was looking at books to add to my 2022 TBR shelf, I skipped over this one multiple times. I'm not really into contemporary mysteries at the moment, unless there's a unique or unusual hook to it, which was not the case here, plus the main character being described as "not like everyone else" because she struggles with social situations just screamed overdone quirkiness and second-hand embarrassment, which, again I'm not really into. But then I found out that there's a movie adaptation on the way with Florence Pugh playing the lead, and since I already know I'm going to watch that, I figured I better read the book first.

Unfortunately, my initial fears were entirely justified. Molly is... well, there's no need to sugarcoat it: she's annoying as all hell. Aggravating, even. I'm not certain what the author's intentions were, since it's never actually spelled out if she's autistic or not, but either way I don't think it was done well. In fact, for the first few chapters, I had this weird feeling like I've read this exact character before, her turns of phrase and way of speaking were so familiar, and then it hit me: she's exactly like Klara the android in Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun. And, well, depicting your maybe-autistic character as essentially a robot is probably not a good idea. Every time she went on about "returning rooms to a state of perfection" I could feel myself getting more annoyed, and if I was super upset and crying and someone came up to me and said "a tissue for your issue"... well, I don't even know how I would react. I realize this might come off as harsh but for most of the book I was so annoyed with the character that I find it hard to be charitable.

The mystery aspect of the novel was also paper-thin, even with the "big twist" thrown in at the end, which didn't make much sense anyway. Here's the thing: if your protagonist's two main characteristics are overexplaining every single detail and not grasping the importance of pretty obvious stuff, for her to suddenly go like "here's in fact all the important details I deliberately concealed from the reader" in the very last chapter is pretty damn cheap. But I guess I have to give props to the author for not going with the twist I thought she would, which would have been even worse. Damn modern mystery books for making me try to figure out what the twist is going to be from practically the first page.

I didn't enjoy this book much, and the only reason I might recommend it is that it's straightforward and pretty well-written, so even when the main character is being unbelievably annoying (which is always), you can at least fly through it pretty fast without getting bogged down in unnecessary descriptions and flowery metaphors. That's not nothing. But I'm afraid I really don't know how any movie could be made from this that won't be considered at least mildly offensive, without massive changes to plot and character. Poor Florence Pugh is about to catch so much shit for taking a role "belonging" to an autistic actress... just you wait.

The Foundling - Ann Leary (2021)

It's not often that an author's foreword already makes me raise my eyebrows, which is exactly what happened here, and it made me a little concerned about the book before I even truly began. Here, let me share the things that made me say, "hold on... what the fuck?" before the story even started. The author starts with a broad-strokes introduction to the history of Laurelton State Village for Feeble-minded Women of Childbearing Age, an institution where women who were deemed "mentally or morally defective" (that is, anything from being a lesbian or a prostitute to simply a woman who wasn't obedient to her husband) were imprisoned so that they couldn't bring more children with similar "defects" into the world. Lovely. She then continues:

"At the helm of this profitable public institution was a fascinating superintendent named Dr. Mary Wolfe. Dr. Wolfe had earned a medical degree when few women went to college. She was one of our nation's first female psychiatrists, an outspoken leader of the women's suffrage movement of the 1910s, and a brilliant public speaker. She was an early feminist, a crusader for women's civil rights, and an advocate for the health and welfare of women. At first glance, it was easy for me to see why my grandmother would want to work for such an intelligent, modern-thinking woman."

I'm sorry??? You just said all that about the institution and yet you think the woman who literally founded it was in any way an advocate for women's health? I know that "women's rights" back then were not exactly the same as we would define them today, but still... this is a pretty big leap... and then on the next page she quotes another passage "written by another celebrated feminist, a champion of women's reproductive rights, and also, like many other progressives of her era, an avid eugenicist". At this point I was utterly confused. Segregating women so they could literally not have children on the off chance that they would turn out "defective" is literally the opposite of championing women's reproductive rights. At least the blurb of the book mentioned something about the institution's dark secrets coming to light, so I didn't think the author was actually suggesting that these ideas were good or the women who espoused them worthy of praise. But the way all of it was worded... I went into the book with more apprehension than excitement after this foreword.

The Chilbury Ladies' Choir - Jennifer Ryan (2017)

I'll preface this review with the admission that I'm not exactly a fan of this very specific sub-genre of historical fiction that this book belongs to, which I like to call "World War II was really hard on women". I very much like World War II stories since I find the era and the history fascinating, but if I'd have to choose I'd much prefer to read about the soldiers fighting the actual wars, and not one of the millions of books about how the people (that is, women) left behind are faring, at least one of which seems to be released every week. And look, I don't want to downplay the experiences of real people. Obviously WWII was horrible for everyone involved, no matter where they were at the time, or what they were doing. But what started out as a well intentioned effort to tell the tales of these "unsung heroes", as women of this era are usually seen, has turned into an incredibly overdone and played out topic, in my opinion. Just look at Goodreads' own WWII page to see what I mean. There's really not much else to tell here and now the only time I mark one of these books as Want to Read is if there's a really unexpected hook in the synopsis, like an unusual location, or an exciting-sounding mystery. So for this reason I don't think Chilbury would have caught my eye had I encountered it now, but it's been on my Kindle for years from back when I was a lot less selective, and it so happened that I was really bored of my reading choices towards the end of last year and decided to let a random number generator decide what I'm going to read next. And when it fell to this book, I was happy to dive in, thinking, what the hell, it's an incredibly popular and well rated book, I'll probably just simply enjoy it.

Women Who Dared - Jeremy Scott (2019)

Having recently suffered through one and a half other books that promised to teach me about interesting women I've never heard of but which were, in reality, 60% Tumblr level "lol men are the worst am I right?" kind of jokes, 20% obnoxious pop culture references, 10 % insinuating that literally nothing has changed since the 19th century and women are just as oppressed as ever thanks to Trump obviously, and maybe 10% relevant information, I was excited for Women Who Dared because I really, really love to read about groundbreaking, trailblazing, amazing historical women, and just once I would like to be able to do so without straining my eye muscles from rolling them too hard.

Unfortunately, this book is also not the answer I was looking for, but this time it's harder to put into words why. Certainly it was not too political, which I appreciated, but it had numerous other problems. I couldn't entirely get behind the writing style, for one thing. Colloquial in certain places, pretentious in others, it was as if the author couldn't decide whether he wanted to write a serious, informative non-fiction book, or a gossip column-worthy, flippant account of the lives of these women, full of rumours told as facts, possibilites presented as certanties, and blatant misinformation.

And oh, these women. I can't for the life of me understand what possessed the author to choose these six women in particular for his book. Certainly they all fit under the "women who dared" title, and it's probably my fault that I expected to find actual role models in here instead of con artists, barely important socialites, and women whose only claim to fame is their messy divorce and all the men they fucked. And just to show that I'm not kidding or exaggerating about any of this, let's take a look at the book chapter by chapter.

The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky - John Hornor Jacobs (2018)

I'm not quite sure what to make of this book. Cosmic horror as a genre intrigues me because I think the fear of the unknown (and what lurks beneath) is so deeply entrenched in all human beings that, if done right, such a work can evoke emotions stronger than any psychological or gore-based horror novel ever could. That is why I’m so confused about and disappointed in this book, because at its most basic it had everything to tell an absolutely terrifying story, but instead it chose to meander and not say or do anything meaningful with the groundwork it laid for itself.

All of this is pretty confusing without mentioning some specifics, so I will try to do so without really spoiling anything. The two main characters are exiles from a fictional South American country that has been torn apart by rebellion and the subsequent rise to power of a military dictatorship. At first I didn’t understand the author’s decision to invent a such country when there are so many where such a thing actually happened in real life, but over the course of the book I came to appreciate the additional layer of otherworldliness this choice has added to the story. Our protagonist, Isabel, befriends Rafael, a mysterious poet from her home country, who eventually leaves his comfortable life in Spain to go home and search for his lost family, which leaves Isabel in charge of his apartment. There she discovers a written account of his friend’s former life, and the strange and more than a little distrubing path that led to his exile. This is where the horror elements really start to come into play, not only through the vivid descriptions of torture he has endured at the hands of his captors, but also through the interwoven story of his attempts to translate an old manuscript. For some reason his captors are really interested in this piece of work, in fact they even suggest that him taking it on was what drew them to him in the first place. Naturally, Isabel finds the manuscript and begins to work on her own translation, which is when she is forced to realize that Rafael is not safe back home and she decides to go and find him.

Sounds pretty amazing, right? Spooky, mysterious, bone-chilling even, thanks to Rafael’s memoir (you’ll see what I mean when you read it), this is the groundwork I was referring to earlier. Everything is in place for a spectacular conclusion where we finally get our answers for all the important questions, such as: Who are these people? What do they want with the manuscript? What IS the manuscript? What cosmic powers are at play here? Well, we never find out any of that. The ending of this book is a confusing mess, at least for me. I realize that so far I will be the only one giving it less than four stars, and I could praise the writing style and the character of Rafael (not Isabel, who was pretty bland in my opinion) as reasons why I liked the book overall – and I did, in a way, because it had beautiful imagery and kept me interested until the very end. But it had the potential to be so much more, and while I’m generally not opposed to open endings (sometimes I even like the whole „decide for yourself what happened after” approach), there was not even remotely enough material here for me to come up with anything that makes sense.

Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages - Gaston Dorren (2018)

As an amateur language enthusiast/wannabe polyglot, a book like this is heaven for me. I’m constantly in the mood for starting to learn a new language, and then I never actually do it, but I have plans, you see. Before reading this book, my plans were, in a nutshell: touch up (basically re-learn) my German and my Spanish, really lay into my Swedish (so that I won’t start forgetting it like the other two), and start either Welsh, Russian, French, Finnish, or maybe all of them at the same time, who cares, languages are fun! Then I read this book and basically it went like this:

Chapter 20: Oh hell Vietnamese seems really interesting! Sure all those diacritics look complicated as hell but it makes the language look so fun, and it would be way more unique to learn Vietnamese than Mandarin. Might give this a look later.

Chapter 19: I never in my life thought about learning Korean but now that I’m reading about it, I’m loving this concept of ’ideophones’ (basically words that imply their meaning just by how they sound, kind of like onomatopoeias but not exactly). Maybe it would be worth a try?

Chapter 17: Turkey and Hungary have a lot of history together, so I already knew that we have a lot of loanwords from Turkish, but somehow I never thought about how much easier that could make learning the whole language. Plus, I do want to go to Istanbul at one point, so maybe it’s not such a crazy idea.

Chapter 13: Japanese used to be on my list back when I was briefly really into anime (I know, typical), and I never completely lost my interest in the language, even though now I only occasionally watch anime. I never knew about this really werid distinction between male and female Japanese, however, and that seems like the kind of challenge I would like to take on. Maybe I should put it back on my list.

Chapter 8: Russian was already on my list but this chapter was one of my favourites. I love etymology, and this short breakdown of how some complicated-looking Russian words actually have cognates in English was brilliant, and it only reinforced my belief that I need to learn Russian one of these days.

Chapter 6: Both the look of Bengali and its system of indicating vowels by attaching different tiny marks onto its consonents remind me of Sindarin. If I ever bring myself to learn an Indian language, I’m now almost certain it’s gonna be Bengali.

Chapter 5: The chapter about Arabic was actually a short dictionary of loanwords that made it into English, but I made tons of notes about words that are even more apparent in Hungarian. For example, the Arabic word for parrot is apparently ’babagá’, which somehow morphed into ’popinjay’. But in Hungarian, parrot is actually ’papagáj’, which is much more similar. Same with kahwa – coffee – kávé, and a few others I can’t recall right now. Did I mention I love etymology?

Chapter 2: Yep, Mandarin is exactly as complicated as I suspected. But I got enamored by the part about compound characters, how one half of them is a clue about meaning and the other about pronunciation. It makes learning the characters a bit like solving riddles, and I love a good riddle.

So yeah. It was a journey, with a lot maybes and mights in there, and I know myself well enough to know that there’s a 90% chance nothing will ever come of this. But that doesn’t make my time reading this book any less meaningful or amazing. Even if I don’t actually learn any of these langauges, I sure learned a lot about them from Gaston Dorren’s Babel.

The Gown - Jennifer Robson (2018)

A History of France - John Julius Norwich (2018)

As a keen student of English history, it was inevitable that I would keep bumping into French kings, dukes, and other notables during my studies, and the more books I read about the same topics, the more the same Fenchmen kept popping up. The problem was, I had a hard time placing them in relation to each other, and remembering which Philip or Louis or Henri was present during which conflict with England. So while I eventually built up a cursory knowledge of some eras of French history, I know precious little about others. Basically, my knowledge consists of bigger chunks from 1066 to Catherine de Medici, and after that only a few tiny snippets about the Revolution, Napoleon, and the two World Wars. I decided a while ago to read a complete history of France to fill in the rest, and when I found out that John Julius Norwich (whose Four Princes I read and loved) was coming out with one this year, I knew it was the one for me.

Melmoth - Sarah Perry (2018)

Traitor's Blade - Sebastien de Castell (2014)

„We’re going to get a terrible reputation if we just keep travelling across the countryside crying all the time.”

The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Heather Morris (2018)

The Serpent - Sarah Fine (2018)

 "I've never been in a duel where my opponent's first play was to throw a giant dildo at me."

Queen Victoria's Matchmaking - Deborah Cadbury (2017)

 „His studious grandfather, as a young nineteen-year-old, had ventured to correct no less an authority than the pope on the finer points of Egyptian influences on Greek art.”