This round-up includes some Advance Reader Copies (eARCs) from publishers via NetGalley. These books are marked with an *. No affiliate links used. Read my full disclosure policy here.
It’s the last week in June, and I am only now writing about the books I read in May, which means that my brain has once again decided to do that annoying thing where I am capable of reading but unable to write coherent reviews or capable of writing reviews but unable to concentrate on reading. Life was much easier when I could do both of these things!
I am still reading non-fiction more than fiction, so my 2023 goal of reading more fiction isn’t going well.
You Are Not Alone by Cariad Lloyd
I have already reviewed You Are Not Alone, but the TL;DR version is that Cariad Lloyd has written a brilliant memoir meets grief manifesto that I want to press into the hands of everyone, whether you are grieving or not.
I read parts of it out loud to P, telling him this is my favourite grief book. This sounds weird, but I have read a lot of grief books, so I stand by my assessment! I shouted, “fucking yes!” so forcefully while reading the sections on how grieving isn’t linear and the five stages of grief are lying to us that I startled Arwen (the dog!)
I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai
The blurb for I Have Some Questions For You* sounded right up my street, so I wanted to love it more than I did. While brilliantly written, the story tried to do too much, and Rebeca Makkai didn’t quite pull it off.
When film professor and podcaster Bodie Kane is invited back to the boarding school she attended to teach podcasting, one of her students decides to reexamine the murder of Thalia Keith, Bodie’s classmate and one-time roommate.
Told across two timelines, the present day and Bodie’s school days in the 1990s, I Have Some Questions For You grapples with some heavy themes, including the ethics of true crime as entertainment, the Me Too movement, cancel culture, and racial bias in the US criminal justice system. Makkai handles some of these themes better than others.
The storyline I had the biggest issue with is challenging to discuss in detail because although it is a subplot, I don’t want to include spoilers. What I will say is that while there is a case to be made that the vagueness, lack of clarity or any real sense of resolution that I found so frustrating is an accurate portrayal of how these experiences play out in real life and on social media, I do not think Makkai gave this storyline the attention required for this conclusion to work.
Again, on a sentence level, Makkai’s writing is beautiful. But by the end, I wasn’t invested in any of the characters or how the main story was resolved.
Bleaker House by Nell Stevens
Bleaker House is one of many books that has been sitting untouched on my Kindle for a ridiculous amount of time. I found the story difficult to connect with when I tried to read it. So, I switched to listening to it on audio via Borrowbox and was immediately hooked.
When Nell Stevens gets to spend three months writing in a remote location, she chooses Bleaker Island in the Falklands. Stevens tells herself that three months of dedicated writing is plenty of time to complete her novel. She soon discovers that, for her, there is such a thing as too much solitude and isolation, which isn’t conducive to writing a novel. Instead, Bleaker House is a blend of memoir, travel writing, and fragments of the novel in progress.
I adored Bleaker House so much that I have already listened to Mrs Gaskell & Me and have Briefly, A Delicious Life on my TBR for July.
Where the Past Begins: Memory and Imagination by Amy Tan
Where the Past Begins is part memoir of Amy Tan’s childhood and life, especially her relationship with her mother, and part exploration of how she built a life as a writer. In the introduction, Tan states that she didn’t set out to write a memoir, but when her editor suggested she write an interim book between novels, Where the Past Begins emerged.
While deeply moving in sections, the format of Where the Past Begins, which includes her mother’s letters, journal entries, and emails between Tan and her editor, did not work for me. It felt like two separate books, a memoir and a book about the craft of writing, smashed together.
Pregnancy Test (Object Lessons) by Karen Weingarten
Pregnancy Test* by Karen Weingarten is an informative, accessible, and timely exploration of the history of the pregnancy test and its social and cultural impact on women’s reproductive lives.
Charting the invention of the pregnancy test, its marketing, and its evolution to the at-home ‘pee on a stick’ tests that are ever-present today, Weingarten examines the pros and cons of pregnancy testing and why there is more nuance involved than we might think. Namely, while pregnancy tests give people who can become pregnant control over their reproductive lives, the invention of the pregnancy test also led to an increase in the medicalisation of pregnancy and childbirth.
I won’t lie; even as someone heavily involved in reproductive rights activism, I hadn’t given the invention of the pregnancy test much thought. From the little I did know, I thought the descriptions of early pregnancy tests involving toads were exaggerations. They were not exaggerations!
I would recommend Pregnancy Test to anyone interested in reproductive rights, reproductive justice, and feminism, with the proviso that this book primarily focuses on the US and Canada, which Weingarten acknowledges throughout.
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