A break from usual news...

Hello, everyone. 

Firstly, thank you so much to readers of this blog, I really appreciate the support!

Secondly, reviews might come a bit more slowly in the next few months due to some exciting news. I am running for office in the U.K! For my U.S. readers, this is the equivalent of running as a Congresswoman. 

It's an exciting time but I need your support - running as an MP requires an initial deposit of £500, and my county (district) is fielding three candidates for our Green Party - we are running on Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez style policies! Our priorities include addressing the Climate Crisis, reinvesting in our healthcare service, education, and reversing cuts to public services. 

If you feel at all able to chuck in a few quid to help us get on the ballot, the link is here. 

Thank you, and normal service will resume soon!

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/get-greens-elected-in-coventry

Review: The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller

This is probably my favourite book I have read so far this year. Obviously it came with a bit of an advantage - a retelling of Troy for a graduate of Classical Civilisation is a no-brainer. But this book still managed to blow my expectations out of the water.

Madeline Miller reportedly spent ten years researching and writing this book, and it shows. It is a retelling of the story of Achilles but from Patroclus' perspective. In the film adaption (it still haunts me), Patroclus is portrayed as a close friend/cousin without even a hint of homosexuality.

This book goes back to the source material and it is just a little different from the film...

Patroclus is a disgraced and outcast prince, after having accidentally killed a nobleman's son. He gets sent as a foster child to King Peleus, the father of Achilles. Already, Achilles' divinity is well-known and the prophecies about him are greater still. Patroclus thinks he will get lost amongst this palace of foster boys, and isolates himself when the other boys find out about Patroclus' past. However, Patroclus manouvres himself to become protected by Achilles, and a friendship - and, when they're older, more than that - blooms.

This is the classic of all classic tales beautifully updated for the modern reader without losing any of the essence that has meant it has lasted for thousands of years. Miller is a true mistress of her prose, with luscious imagery of the islands and city-states that make up Greece, to the dry, sandy, and soon hellish (for the Greeks, at least), land of Troy. Familiar characters like Chiron, Odysseus, Menelaus, and Agammemnon are faithfully rendered in all of their heritage, and then some.

But the relationshp between Patroclus and Achilles, the heart of this story, shines throughout. Patroclus is the steadier of the two men, knowing he has to compete with Achilles' fame and changing character, particularly when they get to Troy - and the famous feud with Agammemnon.

This story is everything you would hope from a modern version of one of the most famous legends of antiquity. Miller has done an exceptional job.

Review: The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off! Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem is a woman that should need no introduction, but I'll do one just in case. She's a leading feminist icon; writer; lecturer; political activist; and feminist organiser. She has written international bestsellers, won a whole slew of awards, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2013.

This book is a collection of inspirational quotes from Gloria Steinem's career, as well as a few additions from other recognisable names, like Alice Walker and Maya Angelou. Each chapter is themed, and begun with advice and experience from Gloria herself.

What is amazing about the host of quotes in this book is that they are as straightforward as they are radical and transformative. For example:

"Women have alwyas been an equal part of the past; just not an equal part of history."

And...

"The voting booth is the one place on earth wehre the least powerful and the most powerful are equal."

So much truth in such a short phrases.


This book will inspire and move you. It will uplift and encourage you. Most of all, it encourages you to completely transform the way you think - particularly women. Many of the quotes in this book have been chosen specifically to empower - a term thrown around a lot, but if there's one thing Gloria seems to want to get across in this book, it's how much power you as an individual - and particularly as a woman, or someone from a marginalised community, or minority - can have. But there's a call to action, too - we need to take that power. It won't be given us.

So, I urge you to buy this book. Let it lift you up. Let it help you remember your own self-worth, value, and inherent power.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-truth-will-set-you-free-but-first-it-will-piss-you-off/gloria-steinem/9781911632597

Review: Rough Waking (Julian Daizan Skinner, Laszlo Mihaly, Kazuaki Okazaki

This collection of poems, photography, and artwork was put together by Julian Daizan Skinner. He runs a Zen practice dojo and is a meditation teacher. His practice works with people who are homeless or imprisoned, and the profits of the book will contribute to that mission.

This is an exceptionally moving collection of poetry, photography, and artwork from three different men. Together, they form expressions of what it is like to be homeless or imprisoned, and the different media capture the experiences. Skinner's poetry charts his journey on the path from student to teacher of Zen meditation, and the poems (mostly short), are sparing but no less striking or visual for that.

Below are some words from Julian himself, as well as some of the poems featured in the book. You can purchase the book from Amazon, here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Waking-Confined-Homeless-Including/dp/0993198155/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=rough+waking&qid=1571849856&sr=8-1

"For a couple of decades I lived in Buddhist monasteries in rural England and Japan, training to become a Zen Master. “Autumn in the Monastery and Other Poems” all came out of this experience. Looking back over this time, the pains and joys inextricably mingle in my memory, and the poems here are similarly mingled. It did not make sense to impose an external thematic structure.

Life during this time was strongly externally structured. Zen monastery life has reminded many commentators of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison theory in which the inmates are twenty-four hours a day potentially under observation. The zendo or meditation hall, my base for the first seven years, doubles as sleeping and even eating quarters, each inhabitant given three feet by six feet of living space. The “total institution” functions as an echo chamber. There is no distraction, no escape from facing yourself."

AUTUMN IN THE MONASTERY

Summer collapses into silence.

The valley bleeds –

leaves die on leaves

and light creeps low through their skeletons.

Gravity sucks the year away,

hollows the sky.

The air, suddenly old, hangs listless,

too tired for birdsong, lambs, tractors.

A distant dog’s bark is a chesty cough.

Up on the fell, life drains down

from stubble, pale as an old man’s chin.

Down in the heart, the river boils shadows.

Stacking wood with stinging fingers, the monks

get ready to enter the dark.

WAKE UP BELL

From the black

far edge of the cosmos,

it shrills through the silence –

Dreams lie on the bedclothes

neatly sliced in half.

A match, struck on the back of the

skull, flares. I bundle these arms

and legs together,

get up, shit, sit …

And the bell rests,

radiant as a golden Buddha.

RENEWAL

Day-long mist.

The valley’s a white paper,

watercolour wet,

smudgy, still.

Let’s get lost,

let our lives go blank,

soak into the white

forever.

Unless, of course, we’re called back,

wetfresh and laughing

from the great white womb,

to do our work.

Review: between shades of gray, Ruta Sepetys

Most stories that are written about the Second World War tend to focus on one of two things - the Holocaust, and the Western soldiers. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it does tend to skew our knowledge and narrow our view of what happened to millions of other people besides those two groups.

This story is one example of how to redress the balance.

Fifteeen year old Lina, her mother, and young brother, live in Lithuania. One night, almost without warning, their house is stormed by Soviet guards, and they are taken to a train bound for Sibera. Their crime? Their father is a university professor. This is the Second World War, and Stalin is invading Eastern Europe and doing away with anyone who poses a threat to his brand of communist ideology.

The family is taken thousands of miles from home, deep into Sibera, where they end up at a prison camp, again, not dissimilar to Nazi concentration camps. Not as much attention has been paid in secondary schools to Stalin's crimes against humanity, particularly when compared to the Nazis, and yet Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions more.

The hero of this story, in my opinion, is Lina's mother, Elena. Although she is not naive as to the reality of her situation, she sees her job as being optimistic and rallying for her children and the people around her. When they arrive in their first prison camp, Elena becomes almost a focal point and creates a community, even in the brutal conditions they live in. Although they are far from free, Elena encourages the people around them to make the best of their situation, always hopeful that the war will soon be over and they can be free again.

The saddest part of this story was at the end, finding out that the people of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia were essentially forbidden, even after they were freed from the camps, to speak about what really happened to them. Their history became hidden until long after the end of the Soviet Empire. This book powerfully reminds us of the job literature can do, to inform and challenge as well as entertain. Just like previous books I've review, these amazingly courageous nations deserve to have the truth of their histories told and preserved.

Review: A Dream of Lights, Kerry Drewery

North Korea is one of the most secretive countries in the world. We sort of know some things about it - the fact that it is a communist state run on the cult of personality and the immediate squashing of any dissent. We also know that most of its population is imprisoned. We don't know, however, just how brutal the conditions really are for the people who live there, whether they are free or not.

This novel, though fiction, is based on extensive research from survivors and advocacy groups. I think it is essential reading but not one that you would pick up again and again.

Yoora is a teenager who lives in a small village in North Korea. Technically, her family is free but they may as well not be from the conditions they live in. However, she starts to dream of strange things - bright lights and music in a faraway city. When she tells her family, they immediately become fearful and make her promise to never tell anyone of her dream.

However, she soon means a boy called Sook, whose mother is essentially an informer for the government - this is known. She meets him secretly every night and falls in love with him.

Until he betrays her.

She and her grandparents are banished to a prison camp. Her father is executed, her mother is sent to the city of her birth. To give you an idea of how bad these prison camps are, just remember what you learned about concentration camps during the Holocaust, and you'll start to get an idea.

Yoora never gives up hope, though. She is rewarded eventually for her hope, though I won't say how.

This book is a kind of adrenaline rush from beginning to end, but not in the same way as an action novel. It's emotionally exhausting, which is testament to how well-written the story is. Everything that happens in this book is based on a combination of real-life stories. It's just unimaginable in our comfortable, Western existence to think how people the same age as us, on the other side of the world, spend their lives in fear and terror, knowing one misstep, one misspoken words, can mean they spend the rest of their lives in prison.

This book is essential reading, not because it is pleasant, but because the reality of the lives of millions of North Koreans deserves to be known.

Review: The Missing Girl, Jenny Quintana

Anna Flores was barely a teenager when her beloved sister, Gabriella, disappeared. Though she's never stopped missing her sister, she dealt with the pain by fleeing abroad the first chance she got. Upon her mother's death, thirty years later, Anna has to return to the village of her childhood and confront her pain once again.

Despite extensive investigations, no one ever found out what really happened to Gabriella, whether she was murdered or ran away from home. The book alternates between Anna's present situation, dealing with her mother's death and everything that goes with it, to her childhood and the months leading up to her disappearance.

This is a very well-written thriller/mystery, set in a close-knit village which makes the mystery even harder to break. Almost anyone in the village could be a suspect, and Anna leaves no stone left unturned, until she has to.

In case you're wondering, yes, Anna does eventually find out what happened to her sister, but she also finds out more than she bargained for along the way - painful family secrets that, had she known when she was younger, she would not have felt as much of an outsider from her own loved ones.

If you are a fan of thrillers and mysteries, then this is simply a must-read for you.

Review: An Unsuitable Woman, Kat Gordon

Theo and Maud Miller, the children of wealthy and influential Scottish parents, are transported as teenagers from Great Britain to the sweltering and up-and-coming British colony of Kenya. While Great Britain is enduring a time of major social change post World War One, Kenya is home to the British aristocracy who are not ready to give up the old ways.

Theo, the protagonist of this story. is ready to come of age. When he meets Sylvie and Freddie, glamourous expatriates, he is keen to seem older than his fourteen years. He gets in with Sylvie and Freddie (and their respective spouses, although Sylvie and Freddie are not so secretly having an affair), much to the chagrin of his parents.

Social and political tensions are the backbone of this story. While Theo is more than ready to embrace the aristocratic, white privileged lifestyle of his peers, and chase the enigma that is Sylvie, Maud soon takes a different route. She readily acquires a social justice mindset but finds herself lonely in this endeavour.

The older Theo gets, the more he finds himself entangled in a web of secrets that binds his social group together. He never stops pursuing Sylvie, despite knowing the danger that she presents, not least because of other men who chase her. Meanwhile, in Britain, the fascists are on the rise and their politics reach Kenya, and soon thereafter adopted by this "Happy Valley" set. Despite being thousands of miles away, Britain's tensions are keenly felt in Kenya, where the elite are all too desperate to preserve the old ways.

The books builds slowly to an explosive crescendo at the end, one I didn't see coming, but after finishing the novel I appreciated much more how the author had written the story almost like a pressure cooker. Even in the colonial outpost of Kenya, which represents the heyday of the British Empire, they were not immune to the global political tensions, which affects both the national stage and the personal relationships.

I don't know what genre I would put this in, but it probably fits best into a period drama. I had no idea what to expect of it, but it was an expertly written story with plenty of questions and drama running throughout.