Be aware that whilst I don’t discuss the ending here, I do talk about some of the themes. Some genre tags have been left out on purpose.

If you’re not happy or having trouble you sweep it under the rug and plaster a big ol’ smile on your face.

Publisher: Hot Key Books
Pages: 223
Type: Fiction
Age: Young Adult
ISBN: 978-1-471-40398-9
First Published: 13th May 2014
Date Reviewed: 23rd September 2015
Rating: 5/5

The Sinclair family holidays on their private island every summer. It’s a paradise where they can enjoy their time away from the world. Have fun, spend time together, not discuss anything of importance. Because the Sinclairs don’t do problems. They are normal, perfect, wealthy, and heaven forbid anyone who rocks the boat.

I knew within the first few pages of this book that it was going to be exceptional. I’ve never experienced that before – going in knowing nothing but recognising excellence straight away. The best way to describe We Are Liars is to say that it’s uniquely unique – there’s the thought that all stories have been told, all books now just variations, but this one seems far from it. The basics may have been told but the way Lockhart handles the situations makes it individual. You’ve never read a book like this.

The author favours a particular style of writing. She uses the same colloquialisms as many others but you’d be hard-pressed to be unable to tell it apart from the rest. Lockhart interweaves her prose with the concept of poetry, pieces of sentences set one line after the other without applying the same amount of effort, so to say, as your usual poet does. The poetry aspects do read as poetry but whether there’s rhyming or a steady pace is not important, rather Lockhart uses the concept of poetry to get the reader focusing their attention on the exact words, thoughts, she wants you to focus on, to emphasise her meaning. It’s amazing.

Both plot and characters are important to Lockhart, who greatly favours showing. So much does she show, in fact, that you may well miss the hints she provides as to what happened. But this is not a bad thing. The author abides by the sentiment expressed by one of her characters, who says:

“Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments.”

This well describes Lockhart’s method: draw the story out. Let the findings start small, slowly building before the crescendo. Slow it down without increasing the word count. This method means you’ll think you’ve discovered the essence of the book only to realise there’s far more to it, and far more to that and so on. Even though there’s a definite end to the book that rests on plot, mini themes abound and are important.

Most obviously there’s privilege. The whole set up, the private island with its big houses and staff and owners who have enough money to be able to call the island a summer holiday home whilst owning even more property elsewhere, is almost unbelievable. The set up is paradise for rich white people, people who don’t even know the names of the staff who’ve stocked their fridges for years. Lockhart need say little; whilst it may be fun, an escape from the reader’s own life to read about this ideal, it’s also uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable on its own and because of the way white is supreme. You could almost call this book delicious in its handling of the subject of racism. By this I mean there’s a lot of racism but it drifts out, ripples in a soft, slow, motion. It’s the subtle sort, the oh my gosh darling we must be polite but try not to shake their brown hands sort. Thus Lockhart demonstrates the sort of prejudice that can be difficult to call out because it’s deftly handled by those who own it, deniable because it’s kept under the surface. Warnings, such as the hints at what could happen to those who overstep their mark are couched in nice terms that fly over others’ heads.

“Watch yourself, young man,” said Granddad, sharp and sudden.
“Pardon me?”
“Your head. You could get hurt.”
“You’re right,” said Gat. “You’re right, I could get hurt.”
“So watch yourself,” Granddad repeated.

This deals with Gat, the only non-white family member on the island whose presence signals a new episode of sorts to this pristine family. As he says himself, he is Heathcliff, a good person, family – sort of – who is expected to become angry in time and ruin things because that’s what outsiders are supposed to do.

Along with privilege and trying to keep everyone away from the family comes the drive to be ‘normal’. You cannot show feelings, no one is an addict or a criminal, everything must be nice, normal, at all times. The media and the world must see perfection. This has a huge affect on the family. Your father leaves? No tears, pick yourself up. Don’t reference your dead grandmother. Forgetting people is a large part of keeping up appearances – taking down photographs is very important. We see the affects mostly in our narrator, Cadence, who finds it difficult to stay silent, who grieves for longer than she would if she were allowed to express her thoughts. A lot of metaphorical bleeding and falling goes on in this book.

The island is a paradise away from the world that never changes and can’t be ruined by life in general but as Cadence says in one of the many variations of a fairy tale she writes (in order to further explain situations):

If you want to live where people are not afraid of mice [Gat], you must give up living in palaces.

I can’t neglect friendship here. It’s what holds the novel together from the beginning, the emergence of a generation that sees the falsehood in the world their parents have created. The title has as much to do with the teenagers – literally the liars – as with the whole family. The false happiness shrouded by a one-upmanship as the sisters try to gain daddy’s love and property.

If you work out the truth of what happened before it’s revealed you may find it easier, if you don’t, and in a way I hope you don’t because it would lose its impact, it’s both satisfying in a literary way and emotionally draining. Lockhart provides all the answers, preferring to restrict vagueness to the middle of the story, leaving the end complete. You need to know what happened to understand a lot of this book and to appreciate what Lockhart is saying about impact.

We Were Liars is awesome. Individual, beautiful, wretched, poetic and embedded in life as much as it’s a blissful escape from it. Let the prose warm you as the story leaves you chilled. Even paradise must face reality.

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Hot summers, long titles, and all that life throws at you.

Publisher: Tinder Press (Headline)
Pages: 326
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-472-22168-1
First Published: 30th October 2014
Date Reviewed: 7th September 2015
Rating: 4/5

It’s 1972 and Katie has lived in Elephant Beach on Long Island all her life. It’s nothing special, but it’s home for her and her friends. The prospects aren’t great unless you’ve the money and status to bag a better education, and most people end up at the local college. Getting high is pretty much assumed, cigarettes are smoked by everyone, and everyone’s got secrets.

If I Knew You Were Going To Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go is a book somewhere between a novel and short story collection, that looks at life in a fictional town in the 70s and life at the time for those coming of age.

There is a basic plot running through this book but it’s best viewed as a series of vignettes, indeed if you focus on the idea of a novel having a plot and a main character, you’re going to be disappointed. The stories are mainly set over one summer, with breaks for memories and considerations and reports of the future, and whilst you hear everything from Katie she’s no more important than anyone else. Katie may be the one whose thoughts you know and whose future you’re more invested in by virtue of intimacy, but Chicurel has worked on the whole. It would be fair to say that this book straddles contexts – a book for book’s sake, nostalgia, and a bit of a study.

Not a study as in get your pen and paper and write an essay, more a look at the issues of the time. These are teens still getting to grips with who they are, working through that time between childhood and adulthood and, for many of them, they’re trying to work through the poor hand life has given them, though they don’t always recognise it as such. The drugs keep them living life happy and although the future is discussed, told to us by Katie, everyone is living for the ‘now’. It’s best to. They know they’ve few prospects and that’ll be hard getting out, getting away, though there are possibilities. Many will die young through their various abuses. What all these teens do have, though, is friendship. Lots of it, lots of loyalty. There is a bit of a contrast with the kids from ‘the Dunes’. Chicurel shows us the privileged, the teenagers that turn to hippie living, throwaway boyfriends of less privileged backgrounds and protests for things they don’t have knowledge of, teenagers that were always going to end up as rich as their parents and do.

A new thought occurred to me, that women had all this drama, all this waiting and hoping and crying over things we’d been told, raised on, warned about, these monumental milestones that ended up lasting only minutes in our lives and were never, ever as wonderful or horrible as you thought they would be.

In a way it can seem like there’s a lot going on here, but it works in context. Suicides, overdoses; what we would now call ‘care in the community’; secret abortions where names must not be exchanged (the quote above is from such a scene); running away for a better life to never find it; PTSD. Everything is handled well and with respect in every way.

The affect of the Vietnamese war on mental health is the thread that continues from start to finish. A couple of the characters are veterans and dealing with scars, physical, mental, emotional. Not only does Chicurel detail these changed lives, she shows well how people back home might try but can’t quite understand what would have happened. The veterans, both young, behave in ways unconsidered and the easiest way to show you how the teens are incapable of understanding is to say that Katie fancies Luke something rotten, dreams about their lives together, but thinks trying to get him to notice her will work. You see that Luke doesn’t care but it’s not because he doesn’t like Katie, it’s because he’s got little left.

And there is a smigin of a theme of identity, of finding one’s place. Katie was adopted and wonders about her birth mother – what she’s doing, if she misses her child. The title of the book relates to this.

There are chances gained in this book, but not too many. To make everything work out in the end for everyone would be to negate the very real circumstances the book is grounded in.

I think it’s worth stating that there is a lot of swearing in this book and a lot of very casual ‘yeah, man’ language. I’m stating this, particularly the swearing, because it should be seen in context. Chicurel isn’t aiming to shock or offend, rather she’s setting the book in its era, in its place.

If I Knew You Were Going To Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go. gives you something to think about. There’s nothing we can change now, of course, but it makes you think about similar circumstances nowadays and how the way things are, the privilege, the support, hasn’t really changed all that much and should have. It may not have an ending as such and it may be but a set of memories, but it’s a good read. As much as it isn’t a happy book, it is full of sunshine and friendship. That others would dismiss the friendship and say that it’s a bad place be damned.

I received this book for review from the publisher.

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War comes with a price.

Publisher: Phoenix (Orion)
Pages: 216
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-753-80470-4
First Published: 1995
Date Reviewed: 23rd August 2015
Rating: 5/5

Original language: German
Original title: Der Vorleser (The Reader)
Translated by: Carol Brown Janeway

At the age of fifteen, Michael has an affair with an older woman. Hanna entices him but he notes the distance she keeps between them, the way she avoids discussing her past. A few years later, whilst studying law, Michael sits in on the trial of several women who were guards in the SS. Amongst them is Hanna.

The Reader is a fantastic book. It’s compelling, informative, and quite moving, too.

Let’s start with the history the novel is based on: Schlink introduces the reader to the way war crimes of Germans were dealt with by the German courts. You get to see the views of the everyday people of their history and the characters run the gambit – people want justice, children dislike their parents even if the parents didn’t play a role (they dislike them for not fighting against the Nazis), and then you’ve Michael who doesn’t defend the war in any sense but looks at those who participated (via Hanna) in an objective light.

Of course whether or not it’s truly objective, so to speak, is down to the reader. Because the personality and personal history of Hanna is so intrinsic to who she is at the trial, and because of the affair, it could be inferred that Michael is biased towards her somewhat. He doesn’t believe she’s innocent – she’s not – but he looks at her in light of her choices, the reasons for them. (‘No, Hanna had not decided in favour of crime. She had decided against a promotion at Siemens, and had fallen into a job as a guard.’) Schlink, through Michael, then, doesn’t just question Hanna’s involvement in the war, he questions her choices away from it. He questions her as a person, questions the decisions she makes. Hanna is all about honesty when it comes to the trial – whilst the other women lie, she simply affirms or denies. Michael sees in her behaviour someone who knows this is what should happen. Where personality is involved we see the affect illiteracy has on Hanna’s answers. Beyond all else, it seems to Michael, is Hanna’s worry of being exposed as illiterate. Keeping hidden her lack of education, in a place where being able to read and write was is, is more important than avoiding jail.

This is where the idea of ‘the reader’ takes to the stage; this book is about far more, literary-wise, than Michael’s reading aloud in the bedroom. Michael realises that far from making the noted weak women of the concentration camps become her slaves, Hanna’s assigning them to read to her is an attempt to make comfortable what little time they have left. Although she later learns to read and write, Hanna is very much a reader.

In the subtext there is a question: is Hanna selfish? She provides money for a survivor to give to charities – in her, Hanna’s, name. She takes Michael to bed though he is underage and she affectively on the run. She gets those bound for the gas chambers to read to her. Are these displays of selfish or unselfish behaviour?

Both Hanna and Michael take control. Hanna controls Michael in the bedroom – not literally, but in experience – and Michael later controls their contact when she’s in jail. Michael uses Hanna’s imprisonment to atone for his guilt but only so much – he records himself narrating fiction but never goes to visit her. He exploits the literal and emotional distance between them.

Precisely because she was both close and removed in such an easy way, I didn’t want to visit her. I had the feeling she could only be what she was to me at an actual distance… How could we meet face to face without everything that had happened between us coming to the surface?

Michael liked the idea of Hanna and the teenage view of perfect love he had, he doesn’t want to spoil it; he doesn’t want to grow up, in fact – every woman he is with in his life is compared to Hanna. And he doesn’t want to face what’s happened. When Hanna leaves Michael, the reader will note she’s (finally) doing the right thing by him, taking her past with her, letting him be a child again and not rolled up in the affects of war, but of course he doesn’t see that himself.

This book isn’t atoning for involvement; it is the case that it shows how people could be pulled in – by the promise of more pay, for example – because as we know that’s a lot of what it was. We can compare Schlink’s writing of the events of WWII with Irene Némirovsky’s Suite Française: Némirovsky wrote of the war whilst she was living it as a person of Jewish heritage hiding from the Nazis. Both Schlink and Némirovsky show the human side of the Nazi party, or, rather, the human side to those who were at the bottom, the low-ranking soldiers who did what they were told to do, or at the very least did what they felt they had to do. Of course in Némirovsky’s case this is more profound, she’s giving a voice to fictional versions of the people who were hunting her down as she wrote, but both Némirovsky and Schlink write in such a way that asks for thought, does not suggest forgiveness nor ask for it.

It’s almost too obvious to state, but there is a lot of information about Auschwitz in The Reader, and about the role of women in the SS. The books ends in a way you may feel it ‘ought’ whilst showing there are far more reasons behind it than the ones on the surface.

A brief word on the writing – beautiful. Simple, to the point, and full of sub-textual imagery. The words may technically be Janeway’s but Schlink’s prose seeps through.

The Reader is a book of great magnitude. The potential for impact is high, the content hard to read but invaluable, the journey sad but necessary. It is a book for everyone.

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Faith, love, and misunderstanding.

Publisher: Salt
Pages: 144
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-784-63029-4
First Published: 10th August 2015
Date Reviewed: 17th August 2015
Rating: 5/5

Kauthar, a white Brit, found herself in Islam. A lack of something in her life from childhood led to a conversion that she felt was always her destiny. And so she changes her name, wear hijab, learns to pray. She finds a husband, too, and sticks to her beliefs when questioned by her parents, who continue to call her Lydia. But as the world changes and thus affects Kauthar, she begins to change, too.

Kauthar is Ziervogel’s spectacular third novella, a book about identity and self-worth as much as it is about faith and religion.

Islam, and to a minor extent, Christianity, features in this book, but religion is not a point Ziervogel is making with her character (it is made, so to speak, but in general). What begins as a story about conversion with Islam at its centre (and a great one at that, details later) becomes a story about the English convert who doesn’t really understand the faith she has felt called to, and so ultimately you see religion both from those who truly believe and the convert who misunderstands. Suffice to say Ziervogel’s book is one of great tolerance, of teaching, and of comparisons that seek to show how people of different backgrounds can get along regardless of faith; Ziervogel shows how location is more important, how the place a person calls home, on the earth, defines who they are as much as their faith.

Conversion and religion isn’t the ‘issue’ with Kauthar, not really. It’s her lack of identity, the feelings of displacement she’s felt throughout her life that defines her adulthood. She views situations strongly – falling off the monkey bars at a park in childhood onto her knees she sees as her first step towards Islam, humble and profound. Kauthar, Lydia, has a lot of love in her life, but not quite enough nor of the type she ‘required’; a fine example is the way her mother continues to call her Lydia and wonders when her ‘Muslim phase’ will be over – you, the reader, whether or not you share her faith or even believe in religion at all, feel the brunt of such a brushing off of the faith as much as Kauthar does herself. You see first-hand, if you will, the reason why Kauthar feels the need to pen a long letter about scripture, which is similarly brushed off.

The book is set around 11th September and so Kauthar’s somewhat fragile state breaks apart completely when she feels the need to defend herself, to hide herself, and often out of her own fears rather than others’ opinions, though there is a scene that starts it off. Kauthar feels discomfort, the hatred that Muslims felt at the time, but takes it differently. It makes her defensive in a certain way because Islam has become so intrinsic to her self-worth and identity, something she has to prove as an outsider – Kauthar is Islam and you would certainly say towards the end that Kauthar regards Islam as her. No one is as faithful as her or correct in their faithful ways. In wearing a chador and later bhurka, she is hiding herself away from view, vocally to abide by Allah’s wishes but also, sub-textually, in ways the reader notices but perhaps not the character, to hide from herself and her past. From the husband she loved and who was one with her – now considered not good enough, not Islamic enough. In a way she also hides herself from her own faith which, as suggested by my paragraph on religions, she considers not godly enough.

Lastly, this is a book about love. Love for Allah – seen from many points of view – love for one’s spouse, and love for one’s home. It is in part Rafiq’s feeling that he ought to return to London, that that’s where he should be, that causes the gulf between him and Kauthar. And the love between the couple is true; you see the utter devotion Rafiq has for this woman he felt called to.

In all Ziervogel’s novellas, the prose is lovely but in many ways, most especially here, it’s not the point. The book is all about what isn’t said, what you can see in your imagination as a result of the words. And what’s so special about Kauthar is that you know without a doubt that you have the picture, the scene, correct, even though you know it’s not there on the surface, so to speak. There is nothing else like it. The word ‘unique’ is tossed about, given to everything so that it looses its meaning; in Kauthar it has a worthy cause.

This isn’t to say that this style runs throughout the book – reading between the lines for a whole 144 pages would be a daunting prospect – but it comes at the defining moment. The moment when you realise the section you thought might be info-dump really wasn’t and that it was the first obvious step towards what was going to happen. The moment where a book that you thought you had figured out fairly well takes a new turn, in a written version of what is happening in the character’s reality.

This is a book that takes conversion, the white convert in particular, and looks at the reasons people choose to make the change. It shows how profound, amazing, true conversion and finding one’s religious and faithful self can be, and the joy of that. And none of that is tainted because Ziervogel doesn’t make Kauthar and Islam part and parcel. A lot of research and knowledge accompanies this book.

Kauthar is a very different book about identity that outclasses many others. Highly recommended to those who enjoy the theme as well as those who like diversity and high tolerance in their reading when it comes to western fiction.

I received this book for review from the publisher.

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Lions and tigers and bears… and war and legends.

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Orion)
Pages: 336
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-297-85901-7
First Published: 1st January 2010
Date Reviewed: 19th June 2015
Rating: 3.5/5

Natalia is off to vaccinate children at risk. In a country torn literally apart by war, help is needed. As she and her friend get to grips with their location, she muses on her grandfather, his life, and the tales he told her.

The Tiger’s Wife is a many-layered book. Good but with vague purpose, it is enjoyable but decidedly average.

The main problem where lack of success is concerned is the way Obreht chooses to write her story. The natural choice of main character was the grandfather but instead Obreht opts to tell the story through his granddaughter. It shows – Natalia is severely underdeveloped. There is no reason to care about her, nor anyone else. Everyone is forgettable.

This way of telling a story, through someone else, may work at times – Lockwood and Nelly in Wuthering Heights are fine, as is Wells’ time traveller speaking of the past – but in those cases there is a basic disconnect, a sub-textual acknowledgement that the narrator is just a device. In The Tiger’s Wife, whilst Obreht may see Natalia as a storyteller, she also includes enough about the woman herself to suggest she wants us to relate to her, to warrant detailing her life. Granted, Natalia is a device through which Obreht also teaches us about the Yugoslav wars and life at the time, likely chosen to bring about a similar affect as a memoir might have, but it doesn’t quite work.

The other problem is more opinion – some readers may find the book too vague. You are left to work out Obreht’s point by yourself; Obreht actually says near the end that she isn’t going to tell you what it was about. The problem is, it can feel like you’re grasping at straws. Suffice to say it could be argued the book was written to fill gaps, to provide a taste, to be beautiful.

And it is beautiful. Obreht’s writing is stunning. There are too many details but the style, structure, words, linger in your mind. It’s typical to describe a good début as not being like a début – this is an apt description of The Tiger’s Wife.

The social and political information is telling. Obreht leaves no stone unturned – she wants to inform readers about the division of Yugoslavia and that’s what she does. She weaves in diversity, showing the different cultures and how to some people the difference mattered, how to others it did not. She is incredibly candid about the way children can be, adults can be, when they are on the cusp of something big but not quite there – the way war can be appropriated to satisfy selfish and bad behaviour.

Those first sixteen months of wartime held almost no reality, and this made them incredible, irresistible, because the fact that something terrible was happening elsewhere, and at the same time to us, gave us room to get away with anarchy. Never mind that, three hundred miles away, girls sitting in bomb shelters were getting their periods at the age of seven. In the City, we weren’t just affected by the war, we were entitled to our affection. When your parents said get your ass to school, it was all right to say, there’s a war on, and go down to the riverbank instead. When they caught you sneaking into the house at three in the morning, your hair reeking of smoke, the fact that there was a war on prevented them from staving your head in. When they heard from neighbors that your friends had been spotted doing a hundred and twenty on the Boulevard with you hanging none too elegantly out the sunroof, they couldn’t argue with there’s a war on, we might all die anyway They felt responsible, and we all took advantage of their guilt because we didn’t know any better.

Obreht explains without trying to apologise, she explains to show what division, what war, can do, how it can change people.

The book is heavily influenced by folklore and The Jungle Book – Kipling’s original rather than Disney’s adaptation. Through these she explores social and cultural problems, domestic violence, the way people will see what they want to see, take from a situation only what aligns with their thoughts. This folklore is where the magical realism comes into play, the story of a man who cannot die and the titular story of a woman who befriends a tiger, scandalising a village that cannot understand it.

This is a book best read away from food. Natalia is a doctor and Obreht describes training in detail. She also has a fascination with the physical affects of sinus problems which are relayed without notice and may put you off your lunch.

The Tiger’s Wife is far from bad but there is an air of ‘written for acclaim’ about it, which was of course realised when it won the Orange Prize. It can teach you a lot but it’s not particularly well-paced and keeps its secrets beyond the last page.

Read it if you will but don’t put it above others on your list.

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