Getting the most out of it.

Publisher: Chatto & Windus (Random House)
Pages: 254
Type: Non-Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-784-74024-5
First Published: 15th September 2016
Date Reviewed: 2nd October 2016
Rating: 4/5

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans created a course for students at Stanford University to help them ready their futures. Drawing from the methods designers use to create and prototype, the authors constructed a course with a difference, one that went against the grain to be of particular lifelong value. After much success, they’ve decided to turn the course into a book in order to help a greater number of people.

Designing Your Life is the kind of book that sports lots of common sense of the sort we tend to forget. It sports a lot of things that lead to ‘ah ha!’ moments. And it’s the literary version of those times when someone says ‘now bear with me…’ and you think ‘oh god, here it goes’ and then after a while of talking that you still think suspect, ends with a lot of very good ideas and value.

To be sure it reads as very American but the suggestions and topics in focus should, this reviewer believes (as a Brit), be relevant to most people. Burnett and Evans – who address themselves in the third person, which makes you wonder who was writing when and becomes something to really appreciate because of the complete collaborative atmosphere it projects – write in simple, easy to understand terms, giving full credit to other ideas which they detail for you in case you haven’t come across them previously. The authors seem to favour the idea of ‘done rather than perfect’ – the writing is plain but it does the job and the book’s complete lack of any filler content (student stories are detailed in order to provide context and examples) just goes to further the overall feeling that the authors know what they are doing. This is to say the book has been designed as much as the lives have been designed.

It turns out that the part of the brain that is working to help us make our best choices is in the basal ganglia. It’s part of the ancient base brain, and as such does not have connections to our verbal centers, so it does not communicate in words. It communicates in feelings and via connections to the intestines – those good old gut feelings. The memories that inform this choice-guiding function in our brains Goleman refers to as the “wisdom of the emotions”; by this he means the collected experiences of what has and hasn’t worked for us in life, and what we draw upon in evaluating a decision. Our own wisdom is then made available to us emotionally (as feelings) and intestinally (as a bodily, gut response). Therefore, in order to make a good decision, we need access to our feelings and gut reactions to the alternatives.

It’s a book to read quickly – we are talking lives after all and one of the authors’ thoughts, so often running in the background, is that we spend a lot of time thinking about and considering the present, agonising over the past and our choices, time that can be put to better use working on propelling ourselves towards our futures. Among the topics and concepts are jobs (don’t waste time on applications that get put into a keyword database, rather try and set up interviews with people who are doing what you want to do – do not think of these as interviews), ‘failure immunity’ (accepting that failure happens but not letting it get to you; categorising failures so you can dismiss minor one-offs and focus only on strengthening your weaknesses), and a ‘life dashboard’ that may seem a bit gimmicky but has a great idea behind it, that of working out your health/work/play/love balance and adjusting accordingly. The chapters on getting a job are particularly good and, like all the other topics included, sport both things you’ll inevitably already know and lots of things you kind of know but not in the way the authors are talking about them.

On that note, a key concept of the book is ‘reframing’ – dotted throughout are sentences that we’ve been taught to believe, accompanied by Burnett and Evans’ suggestions for different angles to view them through. The authors ask: when you try to solve a problem, are you solving the right one?

An example: dysfunctional thought – ‘I should know where I’m going’; reframed – ‘I can’t know where I’m going until I know where I am now’.

The only caveat with this book is that it’s not going to help everyone. This is something the authors address when they say that sometimes you might have to take the job to pay the bills or feed the family and do that until you’re in a place where you’ve space to look at your life in the way this book explains, but it’s not quite as simple as that. You’ll notice that by and large the stories in this book are of people who are relatively privileged in life when compared to others and have had the opportunity to learn skills that they can go back to and think about. Whilst the book may indeed work for a broader section of society than that looked at, it does come from a certain situation and place in life, and the angle the subjects are viewed from may suggest to some readers that this isn’t a book for them. It also isn’t a cure all; while the ideas in general are great, some are likely not to work, for example the idea of having a life design team to support what you’re trying to do – such a thing, as outlined in the book, would take a lot of time and while that suggested 3-6 people are spending time working on your future with you, they’re using time they could be working on themselves. You would need a number of extremely supportive and dedicated people in order to make such a thing work unless, perhaps, you happen to still be in education where everyone is doing the same thing. The firm suggestion that everyone involved get a copy of the book is a little too obvious in its hopes.

Designing Your Life is a very good book with some excellent ideas that do work – there are examples in day-to-day life aplenty, never mind in this book. The reframing idea is important because it gets you to think outside of the box and outside of the normal social thinking that whilst well-intended (or sometimes not!) can indeed hamper a person’s progress. But it’s best to keep yourself objective when reading it, and some may find it better placed as a guide rather than a project.

I received this book for review from FMCM Associates.

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The definition of magic?

Publisher: Ipso Books
Pages: 204
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-911-29567-9
First Published: 24th August 2016
Date Reviewed: 20th September 2016
Rating: 3/5

When their grandmother dies, Anna, Charlie, and Emz inherit her cottage and the woods that surround it, but, already having homes of their own (well, Emz lives with Mum) they decide to let it as a holiday rental. One of these rentals is to a mysterious young woman who likes to bathe in the lake they’d always been told to avoid, and when they spot a man in the woods the sisters are worried. And it seems their grandmother is still around, helping them. Amidst this are the sister’s own stories of relationships, deaths, and young adulthood.

Crooked Daylight is the first book in a planned series focusing on three modern sisters who may have a little magic about them.

This is an interesting take on the idea of magic. It’s the sort of thing that’s been done many times before but not quite in this way which sounds like a paradox and therefore requires explaining. The three sisters – Anna, Charlie, and Emz (whose full name is Emma but as that isn’t revealed until near the end there’s plenty of space to speculate whether, perhaps, Slavin had thoughts of the Brontë sisters in mind) – are people living in our present day with our mobile phones and conveniences. This time period isn’t so much explained as it is shown through slang and the sisters’ often abbreviated language. (Sometimes it can seem as though they are a lot younger than their ages which may be a turn-off for some.) The various housing involves terraces, town houses, and their mother’s new state-of-the-art home… but then there’s also their late grandmother’s cottage in the woods that Slavin’s descriptions infer to be your fantastical wooden thatched cottage. So it’s a meeting of modern reality and slightly older fantasy, but it’s still not that simple. Slavin doesn’t explicitly address the magical elements until near the end which has the effect of pulling you deeper into the narrative as you try to work it out. Is there any magic, really? What sort? Is it just something supernatural?

So Slavin has aimed for something between reality and fantasy that skews more towards reality. It’s the sort of usage that brings to life those times when we wonder how something no one could have had a hand in could be so coincidental. It all works very well.

However, to go back to those characters and their ages that are hard to believe, it can be difficult to relate to them. It’s not that they are dislikeable per se, but they do at times get into drama and other people’s business when they should mind their own, for example one time they have a quite valid worry about a person’s safety but instead of approaching them – a tenant – to mention it, they use their privilege as the holiday home owners to enter the cottage and look around without asking whilst the woman hides in another room, uncomfortable. Another occasion sees one of them becoming quite snotty with some women who so far have done nothing to her (barring trying to stop her and her sisters when they run off with their grandmother’s body to cremmate it in the way they, the sisters, feel it should be done). There’s a disconnection between action and reason.

A seemingly minor element but a compelling one – the sisters’ mother, Vanessa. Vanessa is very different to her daughters and her own mother alike; whereas Hettie (the sisters’ grandmother – Vanessa’s mother) had something magical going on about her and so, it seems, do Anna, Charlie, and Emz, Vanessa is a scientist who lives in an incredibly modern home. Her home is so modern her daughters can’t work out how to use it and whilst this factor may bring about an extra few centimetres in the gulf between mother and daughters, there’s the slight suggestion in it that Vanessa is trying to forge her own path. Whilst the daughters are modern but affected by this magic of their grandmother’s, Vanessa is left out. Her daughters may feel neglected, and that may be true, but it’s an interesting thing to ponder on – why is Vanessa so different? Is it simply that Slavin wants to bring to the fore the difference between traditional magic, superstition, and up-to-the-minute scientific findings, or is it a look at how a person left out will try to forge their own path, their own identity? It may be something, it may be nothing – this reviewer may be over-thinking it – but it’s interesting to contemplate and the difference between mother and daughters will doubtless be further explored as the series continues.

There is no major plot-line in this book which can make it difficult to keep up with the goings on. Various threads and a large number of secondary characters make it feel like a soap opera at times but when the narrative focuses it’s pretty good. It takes a while for that particular thread to become less blurred, to show what it actually is, but the pace gets swifter once it’s settled into. It’s a case of having a lot of information at once, presumably to set up the scene for the series, but it would’ve been better for it to be unwound slowly.

The writing is generally good. Slavin often uses unconventional words – onomatopoeias, for example – that are distinct because we tend to use other words, but this becomes a quirk you look forward to and the meaning of these words is always obvious. But there is a shortage of commas – sometimes clauses that are meant to mean one thing read as something else.

Crooked Daylight is a nice read but quite disjointed. It ends well, suggesting the next book will be very good (and a lot higher in magical content) so if you like the general idea you may want to read it or at least keep the series in mind for when the next one is out.

I received this book for review from the publisher.

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One epic love letter.

Publisher: Canongate
Pages: 407
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-847-67977-2
First Published: 19th May 2016
Date Reviewed: 14th June 2016
Rating: 4/5

Zubaida was studying in America when she met him: Elijah, a man she came to know for just a few days; she had to leave for Pakistan when her university department’s hopes of uncovering an ancient fossil were realised. But when the project came to an abrupt halt, Zubaida went back to her native Bangladesh and married her childhood friend, effectively bringing an end to her acquaintance with Elijah. Years later, after meeting and splitting from him again, she has chosen to tell him everything in a letter.

The Bones Of Grace is a somewhat epic story that also includes another story within the story. It’s the sort of book you’ll likely either love or hate (very difficult to rate!) but either way appreciate the background detailing.

What first strikes you is Anam’s writing – it’s sublime. There are no two ways about it. It’s the sort of writing that is so wonderful, so well put together, so constant, that it has a very real affect on the novel’s flaws. You won’t dismiss the flaws, but you will feel as though you want to dismiss them. But what’s interesting is that this isn’t necessarily Anam’s natural writing style, it’s all Zubaida – during the story within a story, where we hear directly from Anwar (and it’s just that Zubaida has included his words in her letter) the writing is very different. More… male, appropriately. (Anwar is a man looking for his past love who puts his search on hold when he runs out of money.) Zubaida’s words, the flow of her writing, does make up somewhat for what could be called a frustrating narrative.

And I could imagine almost every day of your childhood, because it would have been documented in films or on television – in that way, you had probably lived a deeply unremarkable life, had experiences without specificity, and that had bothered you, the way my own past grated at me. All the things that irrritated you were things that I longed for, and all the things you longed for were things I took for granted.

I want to tackle this narrative before moving forward (hopefully the above extract exudes the quality and how the narrative can be both beautiful in what it says and, to use a word from the extract, grating). Whether Zubaida is annoying is really up to you, your personality, and, likely, down to your own experience of love and heartbreak. That Anam has captured her particular tale in a very honest way is hard to dispute – I think we’ve all had times when we’ve realised we’re dwelling too much on something and need to stop discussing it, and that that doesn’t always mean we stop thinking about it – it’s just a case of whether you’re happy to spend 400 pages on it and, indeed, whether you believe in this woman, Zubaida, writing a 400 page letter of excuse and apology.

Of course without the number of pages, we wouldn’t have a novel, we’d have a pamphlet, a novella at most, so this is where the background and ship-breaking comes in.

“It’s a cruel industry. For years we’ve been working slowly, patiently with the owners. Suddenly she comes and tells us how terrible things are. A film isn’t going to change anything.”

Anam uses Zubaida to look at the end-of-life of ships, in this case a cruise ship. There is the time when the ship is created – overseas – and sets sail, multiple times – overseas – and then, when it’s deemed too old, it comes to Bangladesh where men work for little pay, breaking it into pieces to be sold on. Zubaida comes to the beach as a translator for a western reporter who is looking to make a film (and possibly press charges against the management). Through Zubaida, Anam shows the horrors of the situation – the lack of safety, the deaths, and the exposure to chemicals and other toxic ingredients the workers face. It’s a uniquely-realised story. The inclusion of Anwar’s story, in which he comes to work at a ship-breaking beach, adds to the level of detail involved.

Then there is the palaeontology. Zubaida’s passion is the study of the fossil of a walking whale – a creature that slowly evolved to live under water whilst other creatures evolved to live out of it. Her journey is set around her attempts to get access to the fossil, first overseas then through the removal and sending of the bones to America. The journey shows the conflict between work (the will to, in this case) and relationships. Anam is an anthropologist which means you get a lot of detailing, but her writer self stops it becoming too much.

Amidst this is Zubaida’s lifelong mental conflict – she was adopted, lives in a well-off family and her fiancé is rich, but she doesn’t know anything about her birth mother and starts to feel a need to know where she came from. This is where privilege and class enters, where the underlining of Zubaida’s poorer beginnings limits what there is for her to know. It’s there in the background when she begins to question, no matter what category the question comes under; her thoughts of love, duty, and Elijah are informed by her adoption. In meeting Elijah she finds herself thinking of things she’d never thought about before and quite possibly never would have otherwise, and family duty and a general lack of mental strength hold her back from taking it further. She has all this luxury in consequence of being with Rashid, she’s lucky, she shouldn’t be thinking of Elijah. But she is thinking of him.

And amidst this turmoil is a minor story – minor in how much time it takes up (it’s big in terms of real-world impact) – of war, of the effects of it and of war crimes coming to light. Zubaida’s mother has spent her years working towards justice. Her father’s work and business has been ethical. You see glimpses of the Bangladesh war.

Now the ‘twist’, if it can be called so, that you start to see when Anwar makes his entrance (because if a stranger becomes involved you know there’s got to be a connection somewhere), isn’t as predictable as you might first think. It’s quite likely you’ll guess correctly, and, yes, of course this part of the narrative could be considered a device because how likely is it that it’d all happen in real life and so on, but it’s a novel after all. The reveal is pretty satisfying – it won’t blow your socks off but it may well make up for any frustration you had been feeling due to the way Anam goes about it. Make no mistake – don’t go assuming the twist the main reason for the book. It’s not – the book is all about the journey, the writing, the history, the palaeontology, and the ship-breaking – but it does give it an extra lift.

The Bones Of Grace is a slow-paced book. There’s not really any action in it; certainly that it’s one long letter should suggest this as a possibility. It’s very much a literary book, an issues book, wherein the pleasure is in its bookish sensuality.

If you like the sound of that and if what’s heralded as good about it hits the right notes for you, it’s likely you’ll fall completely in love with it. If it doesn’t hit the right note, you’ll likely still appreciate it but it may take you a while to get through.

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Not the happy Mexican one.

Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 461
Type: Fiction
Age: Young Adult
ISBN: 978-0-141-34583-3
First Published: 7th May 2013
Date Reviewed: 7th July 2016
Rating: 3/5

The alien ‘waves’ arrived with only ten days warning. For those ten days, a vast mother ship hovered in the sky; humanity went about life as normal, wondering if the aliens would make contact and either becoming excited or remaining indifferent to the idea. Like the other kids, sixteen-year-old Cassie continues going to school and it’s during a lesson that the lights go out, mobile phones go dead, and a plane falls from the sky. Suddenly excitement about alien contact goes silent, as silent as the waves of death the aliens begin to spread.

The 5th Wave is a Young Adult science fiction book that is an easy and often well-paced read but unfortunately suffers due to its formulaic nature and writing.

The story begins well and with much promise – this will not be your usual alien-invasion story, says Yancey, and Cassie quickly quashes her misgivings over using a gun. She will shoot if she has to. It’s all rather exciting. Get past the first section, however, and the true concept reveals itself: The 5th Wave may not be your ‘usual’ alien story (or at least not too usual) but it is your usual dystopian. After that first section wherein Cassie was a character you were fully looking forward to spending a vast number of pages with, two things happen.

First thing: Cassie’s personality changes. She meets a boy and suddenly it’s no longer a question of guns and survival and aliens outside the door (the humans have considered the possibility of infiltration) but looking nice, washing her hair… you get the idea. That Cassie falls in love in a desperate situation is understandable, but that she suddenly pushes the apocalypse to the side isn’t exactly realistic. She’s just survived tsunamis and a plague that wiped out billions, people are dead and every second counts in saving someone only she can save, but let’s have a cuddle first.

Second thing: the narrative switches to other characters. This isn’t a problem in itself, even if it does mean the book leans ever more into that formulaic territory, it’s that Yancey doesn’t tell you he’s switching and the lack of names mean it always takes a bit of time to work out who you’re reading about. The first new point of view matches Cassie’s in that the situation is one you naturally think is hers – Cassie was hurt so turning the page to read about someone being given first aid sounds like a continuation of the narrative. (I myself thought the referrals to this person as ‘he’ amounted to some sort of alien female-led society, which would’ve been rather awesome.)

Following on from this narrative change is the way Yancey goes about answering questions. He doesn’t really need to say anything, the book is entirely predictable once you’ve figured out what his plan is, but as it trickles out you see the influences – The Hunger Games, a certain vampire series, and notable bits and pieces from other books that it would spoil the ‘reveal’ to list, blended together (there’s even some sort of inner goddess spin-off going on). If you’ve read any of those books or seen the film adaptations, you won’t find anything new in this book.

Are the aliens exciting? Not really. They’re said to be very advanced but they’re conveniently limited by our technology at times. They make choices that allow Yancey to keep the story going. And there will be no epic battle with them later on in the series because of the way Yancey has constructed their civilisation.

There is one very good thing about this book and that is the atmosphere, or slight commentary, Yancey includes of political historical situations. Many other reviewers have noted the Colonial era, the British invasion of America and subsequent trampling of the Natives; I myself found a study of the Holocaust. Suffice to say there is something subtle at work where Yancey is looking at invasion, human against human, and showing how awful it is by pitting the whole of humanity together against another species. There’s no real conclusion to it here and indeed it seems more the general assumption of readers that there is this subtext (rather than an obvious sign from Yancey) but as many have seen it it’s something to bear in mind and, whatever it really is, it lifts the book above its narrative, at times giving it an air of literary fiction. It’s just that it’s not enough to keep the book above the narrative in the long run.

The 5th Wave is worth reading if you want something easy and if you’ve read other dystopian Young Adult trilogies and want more of the same (it is fun in that way – the pages fly by), but if you’re after a good alien invasion story you’ll be disappointed.

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Current, constant, conflict.

Publisher: Legend Press
Pages: 315
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-785-07972-6
First Published: 1st June 2016
Date Reviewed: 12th September 2016
Rating: 3.5/5

Udi wants to move to England, to join his cousins. Life in Israel does not offer him what he wants. His girlfriend and family may want him to stay but he hopes for more than menial jobs. In England, British Jew, Daniel, wants to move to Israel, seeing it as his destiny and the place he just ought to be. His friendship with Safia will never progress to a relationship because she is Muslim and he feels it would be wrong, and when he meets Orli in Tel Aviv he feels a draw greater than the one he feels towards Safia, and greater than the one he felt towards his old long-term girlfriend. Amidst these stories is that of Kaseem and Dara, a relationship that secretly crosses the border.

Chains Of Sand is a novel set during the here and now of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Taking on the narratives of Jews, Wayne has written a book that has the potential to divide before it brings everything back together for a short time at the end; in looking at the conflict, Wayne writes from a specific viewpoint first and foremost. She details the day-to-day of fighting, of security and the way such security has become par for the course by both necessity and anxiety. She shows the conflict between modernity and tradition, how in theory one might want to dispense with tradition but in reality it’s ingrained within them, sometimes in ways they don’t realise until they do dispense with it. She shows how holding steadfast can result in familial conflict and how not holding steadfast can result in familial conflict. And she shows obvious cultural differences, violence, lazy contentment-filled days, and everything in between. Reading from afar it’s a big reminder of everything that isn’t covered in the news, of the regular life going on behind the conflict, but also the irregularities that are ever apparent and the intolerance – whilst working from one side of the equation she shows the various intolerances as well as liberal views.

So this book is a look at the conflict right where it is happening, as well as a look from afar. It includes direct knowledge, lived knowledge, and rose-tinted glasses. But something is lacking in the overall presentation and it isn’t until much later that it becomes apparent that what’s lacking is emotion (other than thoughts of love, which themselves aren’t always convincing, the context more often lust). There is a divide between reader and character that is down to the way the story has been written and presented; as the end pages draw near this lack disappears and in its place is the emotion that the rest of the book needed, that helps you relate, that gives you a reason to read, that gets rid of the dryness. This is not to say that every thought any character has should be laced with emotion but a subject of this magnitude and current relevance… you gain knowledge of viewpoints and of the working of the war but the characters’ thoughts, when dealing with it, don’t really ask you to think or engage; it can be a struggle to work out what you are supposed to be taking from it as a reader. Is there a message? It seems so, but trying to work out what exactly that is (until the end, which is a bit late and a bit too much, playing catch-up) and even trying to just look at the book as a study is difficult without that authorial invitation to involve yourself in the text.

Some of this is due to the writing. The writing is okay but there are some odd choices of words, odd phrases that jolt you out of the narrative, and a strange way of translating tone and inference that doesn’t match the situation. (As an example, there are various lines of dialogue that end with “…, no?” which when dealing with Israeli characters seems a way to translate how Hebrew compares to English ways of speaking but it’s then used by British Jews when speaking their fluent first language of English.) It’s not a bad style by any means but the lack of flow often means sentences need a couple of re-reads to understand.

Something included that really works is Udi’s background – Udi is an Iraqi Jew whose family moved to Israeli. His presence in the story enables Wayne to study something that doesn’t get much of a look in – racism within – and open up the narrative far beyond stereotypes. There is a section, for example, where Udi and his friends go to a nightclub, but Udi is denied entry because the doorman will not believe he is Jewish rather than an Arab Muslim. This, whilst a different subject, helps set up the short narrative of a cross-cultural relationship wherein Wayne really delves into the variety of opinions in the region, the liberal sides of the equation, whilst harking back to a type of narrative that is tried and true and thus has a firm basis for the reader to start from. This said, some other uses of tried-and-true come across as devices and detract from the reading experience.

The timeline is confusing – with three narratives, two periods of time, and oft-usage of the present tense, the general confusion of who is speaking and when continues throughout. Most especially because within those sections once you’ve figured out the who and where and when, which becomes easier, you’ve then got to constantly adjust between paragraph and multi-paragraph sections within chapters and these aren’t labelled or set apart from the rest. It means that you could be reading something important but you won’t know because the context is not there and as you don’t really want to be reading a lot of text over and over you miss some of it.

Chains Of Sand has a good idea behind it – one thinks, it is difficult to be definite – but it is confusing. It informs, it’s bold in what it does, and it’s fairly balanced in its overall focus, if not in its characters, but you do need to be prepared to do a lot of legwork.

I received this book for review from Midas PR.

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