Review: "Pardalita" by Joana Estrela

Pardalita by Joana Estrela
Translated by Lyn Miller-Lachmann
English edition published March 2023 via Em Querido
★★★★

This quiet story follows Raquel, a teenager, through a season of life in her small Portuguese town. Raquel is on the cusp of everything: of being catapulted out of high school and into whatever is beyond it, of moving beyond her small town where everyone knows everywhere, of figuring out who and what she wants to be. And then there's Pardalita, a girl a year or so older who captures Raquel's attention in ways Raquel can't quite bring herself to admit to.

My favorite thing about this is, far and away, the mixed use of art and prose here. Sometimes the book takes the shape of a graphic novel, with fairly simple, straightforward black-and-white drawings, but just as often it falls into a page or two of prose, or prose poetry, as Raquel ruminates on either the current world around her or little vignettes from childhood that influence how she thinks about the world now. The art's not my go-to style (for preference, I guess I lean toward something more lush), but it's clean in a way that makes me twitch to pick up a pen and try to imitate it (I can't draw worth beans, but sometimes, if a drawing is straightforward enough, I can make a reasonable facsimile—if I could draw well enough to make comics, I'd be over the moon).

I suspect this will be fairly hit or miss with readers: it's a quiet story, understated, without a lot of dramatics. I'd have loved to know a bit more about Pardalita and what Raquel sees in her, because to me she's sort of...anywoman? anygirl? And yet I know exactly what Raquel means when she can't help but want to be near Pardalita all the time, when it's almost a relief that Pardalita will be leaving for Lisbon in a few months, because proximity makes the pull that much stronger.

This is one of several graphic novels translated into English that I've read recently, and I'm loving the differences—sometimes just small things, like the shape of the buildings in the background, but also perhaps a difference in the way the story is put together compared to the bulk of the (American) graphic novels I've read. 3.5 stars and would happily read more.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Sizzle Reel" by Carlyn Greenwald

Sizzle Reel by Carlyn Greenwald
Published April 2023 via Vintage
★★★

Things aren't quite going Luna's way: she's an assistant in a dead-end job rather than a rising star in the cinematography world, she's just barely come out to herself as bi and can't imagine coming out more broadly, and to add insult to injury she's convinced that she's the only virgin left in the world. Enter Valeria, one of Hollywood's new It girls...who happens to have a new project, and who is also tripping Luna's fledgling sense of gaydar.

Val is a highlight of the book—confident and funny and thoughtful. She's good at what she does, and she knows that she's good at what she does, but she's not precious about it. I also love that although there's a love triangle in the book, between Luna and Val and Luna's friend Romy, there's no bad guy here. So many love triangles in books end in "but actually, the wrong person is a terrible person!" which always feels to me like an unrealistic cop-out. And it's genuinely interesting to see Luna frame the world through the lens of a cinematographer: she looks at a moment and imagines it as a scene in a film, thinking about what she'd do with light and camera angles and focus.

In a lot of ways I think Sizzle Reel works best if you read it as being set not in the present day but a decade or so back. In the present day, we have Luna, who 1) is a raised-in-Cali liberal, 2) went to film school, again in California, 3) works in Hollywood, and 4) has a network of queer friends, including 5) her best friend and roommate, with whom she is used to discussing sex and romance. And in that context, I found it surprising that she has so little idea of how two women (or otherwise people without a certain piece of anatomy—they say "sapphics" a lot, perhaps to account for Romy being nonbinary) can have sex. It's more than ignorance, though; it's a real resistance to the numerous people who tell Luna throughout the book that there are more ways to have sex than Tab A into Slot B.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with being a twenty-something (or older!) in 2023 still trying to figure it out. (A man once told me that it wasn't sex if there wasn't the possibility of someone getting pregnant, which is wrong on so many levels that I still can't even begin to sort them out. I asked what that meant about the multiple years I had spent in a live-in relationship with another woman, and he concluded that sex had not been possible. That was in 2019, so I think it's safe to say that more education is needed.) But...it felt like so much of Sizzle Reel keeps circling back to "Okay, now I've done this and this and this and this and this, but none of that counts because it wasn't Tab A into Slot B, and I'm so inexperienced!"

So I'm left with something that is interesting but frustrating. Again, maybe best read as though it takes place a decade earlier, or as though the characters are—in a non-creepy, of-age-to-consent, smaller-age-gap-than-exists-in-the-book way—rather younger.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Hot Dutch Daydream" by Kristy Boyce

Hot Dutch Daydream by Kirsty Boyce
Published April 2023 via HarperTeen
★★★★

If Sage can keep her plans on track, she has it made—a summer in Amsterdam, a prestigious internship, and a bright academic future. And Sage is nothing if not good at keeping her plans on track. But there are complications: first, the internship is a side dish alongside a main of nannying...and second, there's a certain redhead occupying more of Sage's thoughts than she's allowed for, and he's the last person she should be dating.

Hot Dutch Daydream is a follow-up to Hot British Boyfriend, with some overlapping characters and another city to visit. I have an enduring love for YA travel lit, and neither this nor Hot British Boyfriend disappointed. Setting-wise, I'm thrilled that this takes place in a less-traveled place—so much American travel YA takes place in England, France, and Italy, with occasional side trips to Spain or Greece or South Korea. Amsterdam is hardly a backwater place (as the book itself notes, it's a major European city), but it's comparatively rare to see American YA set there. (It is now my fervent wish that Boyce will continue this series with books set in even farther-flung places—how about Warsaw, or Lima, or Ulaanbaatar? You have no idea what I would give for a well-written YA novel set in Ulaanbaatar.)

And character-wise: Sage is a completely different character than Ellie (of "Hot British Boyfriend"), which I also love. Ellie grew on me, but Sage is so wonderfully determined and confident from the get-go—in a way that my teenage self would never have been able to relate to, but my adult self applauds. Also, the loss backstory (Sage had a death in the family a few years prior to the book) is painfully on-point.

I have quibbles, because I always have quibbles: first, although the romance is sweet, I wished we could see a bit more of Sage developing platonic friendships. (If I always have quibbles...I always, always want less romance and more platonic friendship in YA.) And second—although this is such a minor thing—it was kind of surprising that Ryland had never been to Berlin and was worried about the cost of a flight. Travel in Europe is a lot easier, and cheaper, than in the US, and while a bus from Amsterdam to Berlin is not the most fun road trip ever, it's certainly doable (about thirty euros, one-way). Ryland doesn't seem like someone to let a mid-length bus trip deter him from seeing a city that has long been friendly to artists.

Someday I'll learn to pace myself when reading light and very entertaining fiction, but that day is not today. An excellent read for a dreary winter day when I was wishing for summer.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Shadow of the West" by Sarah Brotherhood Chapman

Shadow of the West by Sarah Brotherhood Chapman
Published April 2023 via Black Rose Writing
★★★

West Berlin, 1977: The daughter of a diplomat, Kate is starting over in yet another school and yet another country. In West Berlin, though, she can't exactly stroll carelessly out of town for a day trip—West Berlin is an enclave, surrounded by layers of wall and death strip and gun-toting soldiers.

East Berlin, 1977: Anika and Michael are scraping by, barely. They are not fans of the communist regime—and the communist regime is not a fan of their family.

With the Wall, never the twain should meet—but Kate is desperately curious about life on the other side, and Anika and Michael have good reason to seek out connections with the West...and to seek out reasons for hope.

I jumped at the chance to read this, because so much YA set in Germany is about WWII, and I'm curious about times since then. The Cold War makes for such a rich setting, and a divided Berlin is particularly illustrative—one side literally walled in, yet with freedoms and excesses, and the other side with...none of that, at least not for the common people. (I know Berlin very well but still have trouble wrapping my head around the way the Wall, and in particular West Berlin, worked.) Here, as a Westerner, Kate can go back and forth more or less at will, and an unexpected connection with Michael makes her far more curious than most of her classmates.

There are some really smart choices here, some of which may be reflective of the author's own experience as a diplomat's child who lived in West Berlin as a teenager: Kate already speaks some German, which makes it easier for her to communicate in the East. (I suspect her command of German is higher than is realistic for her situation, but it serves the story well.) She makes some rather teenaged choices, but she's also been around the block before—she knows from time in Moscow what it means to live in a communist state, and how to cover conversations and sometimes tracks if you don't want the government listening in, and how far she can safely push the envelope. (She also knows, crucially, that as an American with a diplomatic passport, she is at far less risk in East Berlin than anyone she might interact with.) Details add to the story—on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt, for example, Kate and her classmates aren't allowed to open the window blinds. Can't have the Westerners seeing, or making eye contact with, people from East Germany while they're on their way from a Western enclave to the open West. (I'd have loved more direct contrast of the living situations—a comparison of Kate's room in the West and Anika's in the East, maybe, or about the groceries that Anika and Michael can and cannot get. How close are they to hunger? When Kate brings cookies, how usual or unusual would that feel?) The romance is also appropriately complicated, as there's never really a question of whether or not an East-West relationship can work.

The ending (vagueness to avoid spoilers!) is not my favorite. You can see the outline of the end coming from quite some distance, but it would have felt more realistic to me for the original plan to work out. Evil villains who are evil are also not my favorite, and the one here is a guy that Kate literally describes as looking "like a comic-book villain" (loc. 3625) the first time she sees him; he sneers and jeers and laughs sardonically, among...well, a lot of other things. To be fair, the villains of the USSR seem to have operated with a level of power that allowed them blatancy, but villains so slimy they leave tracks will never be my choice in books.

Overall, a fascinating look at a place and time that both are singular and bear resemblance to current situations—think of the way North Koreans are blocked off from the rest of the world, or the way Putin has tried to isolate Ukraine. 3.5 stars, and I'll look with interest for any future books Chapman writes.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "The Fiancée Farce" by Alexandria Bellefleur

 

The Fiancée Farce by Alexandria Bellefleur
Published April 2023 via Avon
★★★★

A classic romance trope meets a queer love story in this fast-paced read for fans of Ashley Herring Blake.

Tansy is more comfortable with her books than with people—and inventing a girlfriend based on a romance novel cover didn't seem too risky. For better or for worse, though, that romance novel cover model is a real person...with a very good reason to want a fake girlfriend, and a real fiancée, of her own. Shenanigans (need I say it?) ensue.

Now—I read this 90% for the cover, 5% for the fact that one heroine works in a bookstore and the other works in publishing, and 5% for it being a contemporary queer romance novel. And take heart, readers: the cover is ripped directly from the contents of the book. (I'm less thrilled by the fact that the cover artist has removed Tansy's curves, but the dresses are well and truly in there.)

What intrigued me so much upon reading this, though, was just how much of a classic trope this is—engagement/marriage of convenience based on a little white lie—but updated for the present day. The conflict with Tansy's stepfamily is reminiscent of Delilah Green Doesn't Care, sure, but fake-engagement-turned-real setup is straight out of Turbulent Covenant, published in 1980. Turbulent Covenant remains the worst romance novel that I've ever read, but not because of the trope; it's so terrible because the hero is a would-be rapist who chokes the terrified heroine, leaves bruises, etc., and gets away with it all because love...and because of their marriage of convenience. The Fiancée Farce, thank sweet mercy, takes one look at that sort of predecessor, says fuck no, and proceeds to get on with the heroines both being complicated, imperfect human beings who—and I cannot overstate the importance of this—genuinely care about consent and long-term emotional impact and so on. Could one heroine probably use a long chat with her therapist somewhere between chapter 25 and the epilogue? Definitely. Would the other heroine benefit from trying dry January? Most likely. But they're not compounding each other's stresses.

The other thing I love about this book: Tansy and Gemma talk to each other. Again, I cannot overemphasize this: there are so many moments when there's a misunderstanding, or room for a misunderstanding, and the classic thing to do is to spin it out into a she-said-she-said (hah) drama for twenty or fifty or two hundred pages (the old "you mean she's your sister?" thing). Instead, Tansy and Gemma make a point to seek each other out, to say, "Hey, I heard this thing, but I want to hear your side of it. Can you elaborate?" It makes their budding relationship so much healthier and more functional, and it means that very little of the overarching conflict is the sort of thing that could have been solved with an honest conversation anywhere in the past hundred and fifty pages. It warms the cockles of my cold little heart.

3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 because there are bookstore cats called Mills and Boon.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Questionnaire" by Evan Kindley

Questionnaire by Evan Kindley
Published 2016 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★

The humble questionnaire: whether at the doctor's office or while wasting time on Buzzfeed, we've all been subject to our fair share. Here, although he discusses a range of questionnaires, Kindley zeroes in on those designed to look at personality...for various reasons, and with various results.

This is part of Objects Lessons, a Bloomsbury Academic series investigating the lives and histories of ordinary objects. The first I read from the series, Pregnancy Test, was largely straightforward—history plus cultural context—and this is largely similar in setup (...history plus cultural context...) but ends up feeling as though it has had to take a more targeted direction. These are short books, and there's a limit to how many types of questionnaire, and how many of the surrounding concerns and things to think about, Kindley could cover.

By and large, I found the first half of this book more interesting than the second, as the development of different questionnaires and what scientists have made of the results is...engaging, to say the least. (Let's just say that the idea of scientific rigour has changed over the years.) Towards the end, Kindley dates the book badly by zeroing in on Buzzfeed quizzes and privacy concerns—privacy concerns are definitely not a dated concept, and Buzzfeed is still alive and kicking, but it's also taken a kicking or two since this book was published. There are some terrifically funny details throughout the book (apparently, on OkCupid, "the answer to the question 'Do you like the taste of beer?' is more predictive than any other of whether you're willing to have sex on a first date" (94)—god, the data people at OkCupid must be able to run such weird and interesting data through all sorts of things), but I found myself wishing that I'd read this when Buzzfeed still felt current.

Review: "The Forgotten Girls" by Monica Potts

 

The Forgotten Girls by Monica Potts
Published April 2023 via Random House
★★★★

In Clinton, Arkansas, where Potts grew up, options were slim. "In high school," she writes, "I feared I only had two paths forward in life. One was to get stuck in Clinton and start having babies as soon as possible. The other was to go away to college. I didn't know many people, let alone daughters of plumbers, who went to college, stayed for four years, and graduated with a degree, except for my teachers. But I imagined college was my safest exit from Clinton" (loc.1358*). Potts and her best friend, Darci, were both poor, but they had the drive to get out, and they had the grades, and they knew that Clinton wouldn't be their forever place—they'd go to college, they'd make something of themselves. And Potts did just that: went to Bryn Mawr, found stability and a career path and the American Dream, if you will.

But this book isn't really about Potts's path. Instead it's an investigation into Darci's life—into how, when Potts was getting degrees and white-collar jobs, Darci ended up spiralling further and further through addiction and prison and homelessness and on it goes. Potts wrote this with Darci's full knowledge, and so she was able to interview both Darci and many people in Darci's life, and to use years of Darci's diaries and sometimes paperwork to fill in gaps.

I thought a lot about Venn diagrams when reading this. At first I thought Darci's circumstances could be illustrated by a fairly simple Venn diagram, with perhaps four circles—poverty, addiction, abuse, maybe lack of education. They can all feed into each other, meaning that more overlaps can make it harder to take even one thing out of the equation...but even if you can take one thing out of the equation, there are still the rest to contend with, and there's no guarantee that things won't get worse rather than better. But to really grasp the extent of Darci's situation, you'd have to expand the diagram: poverty, addiction, abuse, lack of education; then also incarceration (and other run-ins with the law), dysfunctional family life, lack of opportunities, parenting without resources, a societal tendency to view poverty and addiction as moral failings, a simple lack of expectation from others that she would, or could, be more. (We're gonna need a bigger diagram.)

There aren't easy answers here, or an easy conclusion. For the sake of spoilers, I'll avoid details about Darci as the book moves into the present day, but the Clinton of the end of the book is much like the Clinton of the beginning of the book, except poorer and with fewer opportunities and with a much bigger meth problem. But Potts isn't really trying to answer the question of "What will fix this?"—she's saying, instead, "these are some of the many, many ways in which life can be incredibly hard for women in these poor, rural towns." It feels like a cliché to say so, but the book is both compassionate and unflinching.

Readers interested in the experiences of women in the small-town South may also like Hill Women, Kin, and Cottonmouths.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*I read a review copy, so quotes may not be final.

Review: "Jackal" by Erin E. Adams

Jackal by Erin E. Adams
Published October 2022 via Bantam
★★★

Every year, a Black girl goes missing in Johnstown. Sometimes her body turns up later; sometimes she's never found. The police do nothing. Liz has been aware of some of the dangers for years, but she's also long since moved away—and it's not until Liz returns for a wedding and her best friend's daughter is taken that she starts to understand the scope of the problem, and how little the people around her choose to care.

Conceptually, I love this: here is an author tackling the deaths that don't get media attention, the voices that don't get heard—in this small town, the police are ready and willing to declare each death an accident, or to blame it on animals, or to otherwise look the other way, because as far as society is concerned these are not girls who count.

In practice, I was looking for something else. I love a classic psychological thriller—one that keeps me awake at night, scared that there is someone outside the window. I want to be afraid for the protagonist, and I want to see her work to figure out who is responsible and how to keep them from doing more harm. Jackal turned out to have something of a supernatural bent, and while it works on a metaphorical/allegorical level, very little of Liz's time seemed to be spent on, you know, desperately seeking her friend's beloved daughter, and only towards the end did there seem to be any real risk to Liz. (Does this sound kind of callous? It's not meant to be–I want a thriller to properly scare me, which this one didn't; I also want to care about the characters enough to worry about them, and here, when a character is murdered, it makes little impact.)

There's still a really valuable story in here—one of violence that goes unchecked because the authorities value some people more than others, and of characters like Liz unlearning the lesson that they have to fit themselves into certain boxes. Jackal wasn't quite the plot/style I was hoping for, but I'll keep my eyes peeled for something similar without the supernatural elements.

Review: "Good Girls" by Hadley Freeman

Good Girls by Hadley Freeman
Published April 2023 via Simon & Schuster
★★★★

Freeman was barely a teenager when she developed anorexia, and she spent the next few years in and out of—mostly in—hospital. She recovered, but for decades afterward it was a tenuous version of recovery, holding just steady enough to avoid another cycle of downward spirals. In Good Girls, she draws on that experience to both tell her own story and dig a bit deeper into the cultural context and understanding of anorexia, then and now.

I'm particularly interested in Freeman's discussion of the intersections between autism, gender dysphoria, and eating disorders—she's not the first to make the connections, but they're new enough connections that I am only now starting to see some of them in books. Freeman clarifies early on that she neither has questioned her gender nor is on the autism spectrum, but it's still one of the deeper looks at the connections that I've seen in book form, and it makes me wonder whether she has written (or researched) an article or two on the subject.

By and large, Good Girls is not a huge departure from other eating-disorder memoirs. That's less a criticism than an observation that there's a limit to how different stories of repeat hospitalizations can be; if you've read one well-written book on the experience there are probably quite a lot of others you can scratch off the list. (Good thing I'm not good at scratching unread books off the list, I suppose.) I would note that this is definitely not a healthy book for anyone not already healthy or securely in recovery; Freeman makes an effort to step away from specifics, but eating disorders are masters at fostering competition, and even without specific numbers there's quite a lot of competitive material in here.

Freeman's descriptions of the treatment she received as a teenager can be incisive; it is of course impossible to say how things might have been different had she been treated under a different model, but the descriptions of her treatment in the 90s are largely bleak. Much has changed (late in the book she reports visiting one of the hospitals where she spent time and noting markers of more individualized treatment, such as different meal plans), but it will be interesting to see how current treatment is viewed in another ten or twenty years.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "The Only Daughter" by A.B. Yehoshua

The Only Daughter by A.B. Yehoshua
Translated by Stuart Schoffman
English translation published April 2023 via HarperVia
★★★

Rachele is eleven, almost twelve, with a precocious intelligence and a certain naïveté. In Padua, where she lives, her family are oddities of a sort, Jews in a Catholic country. But Rachele is not quite in a place, yet, to worry about the differences in the beliefs of different religions—her concern is more that her non-Jewish grandmother might be hurt by a Hebrew prayer that puts Jews first. With her father unwell (growing an appendage, as Rachele understands it), Rachele seeks to better understand her place in the world in this character-driven book.

Religion and family are the thickest of themes throughout the book, though neither of them is treated too heavily—every character treats their religion, whether Jewish or Christian or atheist, slightly differently; Rachele loves her family with the uncomplicated passion of a child, and is forced for the first time to consider that her parents might not be invincible, but if I had to pick a singular thing to answer the question of "what is this book about," I wouldn't say illness or religion but rather a girl on the cusp of growing up.

I'm very curious about the inspiration for this novel—Yehoshua was Israeli and lived almost his entire life in Israel; as far as I can tell neither he nor his family ever lived in Italy. It's hard to know what to make, then, of this story of a girl, in so many skins that the did not wear—religious outsider, girl, Italian. (Especially curious to me when Yehoshua wrote and spoke so passionately about his Israeli identity.) It would be interesting to see what a female author might do with this same subject—some parts of this book (e.g., a priest's treated-as-well-intentioned wish that a pretty, lively eleven-year-old were ten years older so that he might marry her) could only have been written by a man, and...I suppose I'd like to hear from a woman who was once eleven and Jewish in Italy what that was like for her.

It's been so interesting to delve a bit more into translated fiction this year—such different styles! Hard to know how much of that is cultural and how much is just a given author's styles...I suppose I'll have to keep reading more books by more people from far-flung places to gather more data.

Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.