A common name. An uncommon story.

Publisher: William Heinemann (Random House)
Pages: 298
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-785-15077-7
First Published: 4th August 2016
Date Reviewed: 22nd August 2016
Rating: 5/5

When Ma wakes Alex and says they’re leaving, it’s a surprise; Ma and Dad often argue but life goes on. Not this time – Ma has a plan, a long journey to various states, to find various Lauras, and Alex is to join her. School’s about to finish for the summer anyway and Alex is glad – it’s starting to become difficult. (If you read my review of Taylor’s last book you may remember I found summarising that difficult, too.)

The Lauras is Taylor’s second book and it features the same general excellence and talent for seeing right into things and commenting on them, as The Shore.

The Lauras centres around the road trip, the journey that holds everything together. It’s that symbolic use of a journey and the progression of time, growing into one’s self, learning how to be comfortable in your skin. Taylor’s wonderful prose, full of her own dialect, flows slowly, letting you enjoy the story and grounding you in the setting. It’s the sort of book that, if you’re not from America, sounds like it’s set in a whole other world – blisteringly hot days, southern states. Taylor says what needs to be said and nothing more. Things aren’t hidden but they aren’t overly apparent either; they simmer in the background. It’s quite like Thelma And Louise – various bits of plot scattered throughout conversation.

There’s a lack of pronouns in this book but you don’t really notice it at first. Alex is a unisex name therefore it’s really down to your experience as to which sex you imagine Alex to be. Know more men called Alex and maybe the character will be to you a teenage boy. Know more women and the reverse may happen. The use of a unisex name is intentional; throughout the book you get snippets of description – clothes, objects, things relating to the character – that question your visual of Alex.

Genderlessness – Alex is happily androgynous. As one great section towards the end shows – a scene in which a gay friend gets Alex to play dress-up – gender can be an either/or situation, a neither situation, or both at once. The great thing about this subject here – well, one of them as I’m not sure a review could deal with all of them – is that this is an excellent book for discussion. Taylor’s decision is to not tell you one way or the other about Alex. (Will you find out anyway? The point Taylor makes is that there doesn’t need to be any pigeon-holing.) You wonder and that is okay. In writing Alex, Taylor is looking at our social need to label. It’s one of the biggest, core things in society, in regards to our forming relations and emphasising with people and Taylor shows that this is understandable, as it’s been this way for a long time, whilst showing how little gender matters. And, crucially, why it doesn’t matter.

Most of this exploration happens in the subtext. Taylor is all about getting you to think for yourself and without telling you to do so, though by the end of the book the subject’s been covered in a direct manner – the author waits until you’ve had time to process your thoughts by yourself. It’s a fairly short section focused on bullying and as with everything else it’s to the point. It’s a sensitive exploration and highly accessible.

Taylor uses Alex’s coming of age in her detailing of the mother’s story, contrasting, comparing them. It’s interesting how vivid a picture of the mother you get, and Taylor’s inclination for the reader’s imagination to hold sway is active here. Your image of Ma, whatever it is, is correct.

Ma’s story unravels away from Alex’s, during it, but the two narratives get their time. And – you knew I’d get to it eventually – Ma is where the title of the book comes in. There have been various people called Laura in her life and this extract says everything you need to know:

    She’d been quiet for a while before answering, so I wasn’t sure if she was inventing a cover story, if I’d been right in guessing she’d rechristened them all to make the remembering easier, or if she was trying to determine herself why it was that so many of the women who had had a lasting impact on her were named Laura.
    “First of all,” she said, “they’re not all Laura. You’re conveniently forgetting everyone else. My girlfriend who ran off with the preacher wasn’t named Laura. Second, when we got to Florida you were complaining that every kid in school was named Jason or Brittany – it just so happens that when I was born everyone was naming their daughter ‘Laura’. And third -” she paused for a drag on her cigarette – “well. When you’re eight or nine, say, and you make your first best friend, they’re the greatest person in the world and you know that you’ll be friends forever. But one day one of you moves away and they leave a vacancy. And then you meet someone with the same name, and because you’re eight part of you thinks not exactly that they’re the same person, but they were made from the same block of clay, maybe. And you try to get the new Laura to fit into the hole the old Laura left. And when you get older it doesn’t matter that you know things don’t work like that, because your ears will be primed and your heart will beat faster at the sound of that name. It will stand out to you and make something inside you go soft, and since it stands out you’ll pay more attention to them, and if you pay more attention more often than not you wind up being friends with them, until you look back when you’re forty years old and realize that you have a long string of Lauras behind you who were all important, and it isn’t just coincidence but the eight-year-old you trying to fill in the hole that the first Laura made.”

There’s no concrete ending, the perfect road trip never ends and you wouldn’t want to remember a regional destination. But it’s not an ambiguous ending either – things not answered aren’t necessary to know.

The Lauras is a superb book that is likely to stay with you long past the border, long after you’ve left the cheap apartment in nowhere-land. You won’t need much, just a bookmark because you won’t want to lose your place and you’re likely devour this book despite wanting to go slowly to soak it all up.

Related Books

This month has been busy. And good. And sunny and hot despite the constant ‘it’s going to be heavy rain and thunder’ from the weather reports – they do like to be stereotypical. I learned that you can order macchiatos at Costa even if they aren’t listed on the menu, and wrote lots of emails. I also watched the Carey Mulligan version of Far From The Madding Crowd, which I have to refer to as such because it was her role in it that got me reading the book after so many years of saying it wasn’t going to happen. Watching the film spawned at least two blog posts – two written, one other still in the idea phase. I also watched Disney’s live-action Cinderella for the second time, which in this case means I spent half the time getting all philosophical about the way we’re changing what we focus on in the story, meaning a couple of rewinds were in order for the person watching it with me. Oops. There may be a post in there, too.

The Books

Non-Fiction

Dan Richards: Climbing Days – Discovering his great-great-aunt was a mountaineer, Richards sets out to learn more and follow in her literal footsteps. Utterly superb.

Fiction

Colette Dartford: Learning To Speak American – A few years after the death of their child, Duncan and Lola’s relationship is still in pieces and Duncan hopes that a house in America might make Lola happier again. Okay.

Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland – Alice falls down a rabbit hole and finds herself in a bizarre world. I don’t think it’s possible to say this is a bad book.

Rachel Elliot: Whispers Through A Megaphone – Miriam hasn’t left the house for three years but she’s finally ready to put a bad experience behind her and conquer the voice of her mother that resides in her head; Ralph has had enough of his home life and decides it’s time to leave. Very good.

Sara Taylor: The Lauras – Ma whisks Alex off for a road trip to track down a series of people who used to be in her life, all the while Alex is struggling through the teenage years and figuring out identity. Amazing.

My favourite this month was Climbing Days, The Lauras very close behind it. I found Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland to be a little different than I expected, though that was in part due to the way I was thinking of the 1950s, forgetting it was written in the Victorian period.

Quotation Report

If you wish for people to not visit, take a leaf from Dan Richards’ relative and wear a hat whilst in the house so you can say you’re off out… though it might not work in our present day so much.

September is likely to be even more busy. I’m not ready to let the summer go, or, rather, I don’t mind that so much as I wish the evenings would remain bright, but I can see myself getting more done without that constant feeling I’m missing out when I’m stuck working indoors.

What was your favourite book this month?

They didn’t all live happily ever after.

Publisher: Unthank Books
Pages: 228
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-910-06127-5
First Published: 1st September 2016
Date Reviewed: 24th August 2016
Rating: 4/5

The End is a collection of short stories inspired by scratch-work paintings. Nicholas Ruston created the paintings in the style of old film ‘end’ cards – all black and white – and the writers went off and wrote what they would. The titles of the stories have become the titles of the paintings. It’s an intriguing concept that promises variety – there’s the simple link between them of the paintings but beyond that they are very different meaning there is wide appeal.

To my mind the absolute stand-outs in this book are the stories that have taken endings literally – they’ve written the literal end of what could well have been a longer story. Suffice to say there’s a lot of extra thinking you can do after finishing them, whole novels to imagine. The Slyest Of Foxes by Angela Readman details the end of a gunman’s visit, a woman who sees what’s going on in her neighbour’s house, choosing to go round with a bowl of soap that continues a hint of razor. Harbour Lights by AJ Ashworth details the aftermath of a relationship, a very sombre note. Ashley Stokes’ own, Decompression Chamber, looks at the non-ending of the world. Crow by Aiden O’Reilly, a political-sounding ending.

But perhaps the winner is All The TVs In Town by Dan Powell. It focuses on the very end of whatever apocalyptic situation (or is it The Truman Show?) it’s talking about. Various genres within a whole, the mainstay is science fiction/dystopia with a liberal spritz of literary fiction.

The paintings themselves are rendered small but the composition and overall creation is such that that’s all that’s needed. It is indeed true to form – the aspect ration fitting cinema, the frames sporting an almost Hitchcockesque atmosphere. There’s a deliciousness in the blend of old and new – a car in one of them, for example, is mid-twentieth century, but then there’s a psychedelic design in another, with other paintings being decidedly more modern – old base, new ideas. One suspects that for the paintings… it’s hardly the perfect analogy, mass-produced as they were, but consider those foil and copper art packs your parents bought you when you were a child – the finished works were quite something.

So in this book there’s a lot to enjoy, and that there’s a base theme but no other means it’s a lovely break if you like short stories but have had enough of all the connections. The introduction to the book, which includes the background to the pictures and the commissions, is a short story in itself. The book could have done with another proof-read but overall this is a great choice for an evening’s read or perhaps even better if spread over the course of a few days.

Dark in many definitions of the word, The End offers a special experience and an introduction to a plethora of authors you may not have heard of.

I received this book for review from the editor.

Related Books

This photograph was taken by Anna Loverus (no longer on Flickr).

It’s something you don’t think will happen if you’re only reading good books and abandon those you’re not enjoying – you think you won’t fall into a slump.

At least that was my belief when I was going through a good reading period. Not every book was top notch but none were bad; at worst they were good enough.

I paused in my reading when I was at Hay – I took a single book with me, a lengthy one, intending to finish it because I’d made a date for the review. And I was enjoying it, the lowest star likely from me was 4. Because it was hard to find the time when I was being drawn to Twitter and had filled my days with events, it wasn’t really a slump, it was a time issue, but in the exercise of it it was rather like a slump.

I think we can get into slumps if all we’re reading are good books, super-duper books, even. In this case it’s because, ironically, our reading would be lacking variety – we surely need a mix of good and not so to fully appreciate literature and appreciate excellent books. Those of us who write about reading would have less space for critique and gushing can get dull. Even if we didn’t have slumps, we’d need varied books if we were to be good, informed, readers. Without the bad, life would be boring, we’d have fewer conversations, debates. And we need variety to help us improve, to help us recognise what works and what doesn’t. We might scorn bad books, but we need them.

This all said it’s not something we need to worry about happening – it’d be pretty impossible to actually achieve because you never know until you’re into a book whether you’ll truly like it. Even if you abandon a book you’ve still experienced a bit of it.

I’m getting off topic, so: do you get into slumps when you’re in a good book period? What do you think would happen if great was all you knew?

Cast your mind back 400 years…

Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Pages: 466
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-447-24958-0
First Published: 3rd December 2015
Date Reviewed: 22nd June 2016
Rating: 3.5/5

Kate wakes up in hospital. She’s had a fall but can’t remember anything about it or even who she is. Everyone calls her ‘Kate’ but it doesn’t feel right… she finds ‘Isabel’ more fitting. She can work an Ipad and recognise things in the hospital but is surprised by people’s clothing and the absence of Tudor items. Her relatives don’t seem too nice and there’s that malicious voice she heard when semi-conscious that said she should have died…

House Of Shadows is a modern day/Elizabethan time-slip in which a woman recovers from amnesia with the wrong memories, memories that nonetheless match up somewhat to her present situation. Author Julie Cohen, quoted on the back cover, called it a cross between Vertigo and Rebecca and whilst I can’t comment on the first reference, there are definite parallels with the latter.

Hartshorne has created a fair premise and the book succeeds in whisking you into that delicious time-slip experience. Kate has memories rather than dreams or travels so it’s not quite as ‘involved’ as some, but Hartshorne includes the memories as scenes so that the effect is the same as any other. The history is luscious, the romance well set up and believable, and it’s got that same big old house thing going on as Susanna Kearsley’s Mariana, only here the house isn’t a neutral element, instead it’s almost a character in its own right.

Hartshorne plays with the idea of ghosts, pitting the concept of spirits against possession but taking a less definitive route to most – Kate’s son can see there’s something not quite ‘Mummy’ about the woman presented as his mother, as can Kate’s devoted dog – but still it’s not quite your usual idea of possession; there’s just something unique about it that’s as difficult to put a finger on as the reader as it is difficult for Kate to put her finger on her memories. But it’s a lovely aspect.

One of the themes in the book is the treatment of people and the concept of privilege. Much like E Lockhart in We Were Liars, Hartshorne studies the way class divisions still rule in society, particularly in the upper echelons. Angie, Kate’s friend, helps out in every way she can, running errands for the family and helping out with the estate’s visitor system, without any real acknowledgement. She doesn’t have a defined role and isn’t considered important because she’s a commoner (she’s also of Polish decent), and Hartshorne spends various moments throughout the novel looking at the difference between the family needing her insomuch as there would be some chaos were she to leave, versus the family’s view of her which is completely coloured by her class status. Then there is the general hatred of anything other than complete heterosexuality and a major hatred for disability, interestingly also shared by said disliked Angie. The lord of the manor cannot be disabled and he can’t be gay. The lord cannot be a lady and the lord must uphold all the traditions that have never and must never be deviated from. (Whilst race isn’t commented on, one assumes the family keeps a draw full of smelling salts in case they happen to encounter any non-white tourists.)

There are a few problems with this book and one of them (two, it could be said) is major: Hartshorne gives away the mystery in the first couple of pages. First you understand that there’s hatred around Kate and then a few pages after that the major twist shines brightly and as the twists in both the modern storyline and Elizabethan storyline are exactly the same – you realise that straight away, too – you don’t have much in the way of a reveal to look forward to. It’s not clear whether Hartshorne meant for this to happen – it could easily be said that it’s a case of the author wanting to provide intrigue, a hint, and happening to go too far. Instead of hints you get answers.

This means that your interest in the book changes from wanting to know what’s happened to wanting to witness the journey Kate takes to get there, but, and likely mostly due to that fact of the answer being provided so early on, this does not work. Hartshorne’s use of amnesia is a good idea in theory and it means that you start to look forward to Kate uncovering what you, unfortunately, already know, but as the book goes on the amnesia becomes more of a plot device.

The amnesia becomes a device and then it turns into something akin to a deus ex machina move – by a quarter of the way through you know not just the major twists but have figured out everything that isn’t solely minor, but the amnesia remains a device. The answers are staring Kate and Isabel in the face, the answer is glaringly obvious, and you have to ask yourself could anyone be so, so stupid?

These plot and character problems are joined by poor proof reading and weird writing choices – made up verbs and words ending with -ly when there are perfectly useful words already in existence (‘studiedly’, for instance). Plot points and information are repeated in a way that’s either down to a disbelief in reader memory or a major editing error (it’s not to do with Kate’s memory). The book could’ve done with a heavier editing hand and a few more drafts.

You may well enjoy House Of Shadows if your interest in reading it is to experience a time-slip or to look at social division but if you want anything beyond that, you’re going to want to read something else. It’s fun enough as a story, and easy to go back to – it’s quite like the situation I found with Amy Snow, wherein it may not be great when looked at as a whole but it’s a very fun experience nonetheless.

Related Books