#Blogtour #Review - The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart

The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, 1)
Andrea Stewart
Orbit, 8 September 2020
Available as: HB, 435pp, e, audio
Source: ARC
ISBN: 9780356514925

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for an advance copy of The Bone Shard Daughter to consider for review and to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers for inviting me to take part in the tour.

Well.

The Bone Shard Daughter has just everything you need in your fantasy. There are complex, relatable characters, a world so well developed and portrayed that you can just luxuriate in it (seriously - I want to skip lockdown and go and stay on a floating island) and an enthralling plot that will seize you from the first page.

There are in fact, four plots. FOUR!

First we meet Lin, cloistered daughter of the Emperor, but seemingly a failed daughter because she's lost her memory and can't learn his bone shard magic.

Then Jovis, who at first seems the kind of rogue who abounds in fantasy - a thief, smuggler and chancer on the run from the authorities and from crime gang the Ioph Carn. But Jovis proves to have depths and motivations to him and to be embarked on a quest of his own.

There's also the mysterious young woman Sand, trapped on a remote island and also suffering memory loss.

And finally, Phalue. What can I say about Phalue? She's a headstrong young woman, a fighter and a lover (not above wearing her armour specifically to impress her partner Ranami), a bit confused, idealistic - and the indulged daughter of her island's Governor.

Stewart's approach is to spin highly engaging and fast-paced stories for all four protagonists, using the light each of these casts on different aspects of the invented world to fill out the overall picture. It means the book takes off right away, with little or no hiatus when it switches focus between the four (always a risk when they are many points of view) as we come from each strand into the next with an enlarged sense of what is going on. And equally there is something for everyone here: palace intrigue, revolutionaries seeking to free an oppressed peasantry, romance, a cruel emperor (his "constructs" - artificial beasts who acts as spies or agents - are powered by bone shards taken from children when they come of age. The life-force of the constructs drains the originator of the shard of life and vigour until they eventually die). And much, much more (FLOATING ISLANDS!)

Each of the four central characters has their own mystery (or mysteries) and it's pretty clear that not everything is as it seems. The apparently stable order guaranteed by the Emperor may be about to crumble, with other powers crowding into the islands, causing disasters and change. We will see, I'm sure, in future books exactly how Lin, Jovis, Phalue and Sand fit in with that and how - whether - they reconcile their different quests and needs. Meanwhile, The Bone Shard Daughter offers us some wonderful relationships - Lin with her prickly, reclusive father (who has brought in a foster son to jostle with her for the throne), Phalue and Ranami, two women obviously in love but constantly bickering about politics and much else, Jovis, absorbed in his endless quest yet constantly going out of his way to save people (and animals!) Perhaps they fill a gap in his life, make up for a loss, or perhaps they help him fend off some awful truth about whatever he's looking for? And Sand, who we see least of, but who achieves a lot despite her exile to a remote island.

Put simply, The Bone Shard Daughter is the strongest start to a fantasy trilogy I've read for a long time, and I'll watch out keenly for the next part because these characters really speak to me - as well as the background of floating islands migrating under wind and tide in the endless ocean. Put this one to the top of your reading pile.

For more information about The Bone Shard Daughter, see the publisher's website here (as well as dropping in on the blog tour stops listed in the poster below!)

You can buy the book from your local hughstreet bookshop, or online from Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - The Sing of the Shore by Lucy Wood

The Sing of the Shore
Lucy Wood
4th Estate, 5 April 2018
HB, 228pp

I bought my copy of this book from Wallingford Bookshop (@wallingfordbook).

I'm a great admirer of Lucy Wood's stories. First, in Diving Belles she told short stories about women, men and the shore, with a fantastical bent. Her novel, Weathering moved inland, upriver, from the sea-salt and sand to snow and mud but still catching a hint of the wired behind everyday life.

The Sing of the Shore goes back to the coast (mainly), the Cornish coast, with tales (mainly) less magical, but perhaps sadder, chronicling lives lived awkwardly in the gaps left by absent owners and tourists, in caravans and short term lets and tents. The characters here engage with winter cold, with gales or mildew or missing parents, meeting all these different challenges with a degree of acceptance and endurance.

In Home Scar a group of children kick their heels in the off season, mooching on the shore and gently breaking in to holiday cottages. Ivor's dad seems pretty deadbeat, always trying things but giving up halfway. Ivor wants them to move away, to a more secure life. In the meantime, he, Crystal and Gull Gilbert try to enact a stolen life.

In The Dishes, Jay and Lorna and their baby have "use of" a small terraced house while Lorna works nearby at the top-secret Dishes (some kind of satellite or comms establishment, which features in several of these stories, often in connection with misplaced/ displaced families and absent parents). Alone most of his time with the not-quite-talking baby, Jay becomes obsessed with voices from the empty house next door. Something has happened which he dreads coming to light and gradually - without any weirdness, any supernaturalism - his world distorts.

Dreckly is subdivided into sections according to the fall and rise of the tide, following three friends as they comb a beach for leavings from the summer tourists. Just about making ends meet - one of them lives in her van - they are the last of their group: the others have moved on, gone away. Imbued, like many off these stories, with a sense of the seaside after hours, out of time, out of season, this is a beautiful story that really lets its protagonists breathe.

One Foot in Front of the Other takes a step back inland. It is almost folk horror story in miniature. A woman needs to "get back" (From where? To where?) but her attempts are thwarted by hedges, brambles and an ominous herd of brown cattle. With its repetition of slightly varying threats - the noise of gunfire, of an angle grinder, repeated phrases and vague geography, and constant barriers (hedges, fences) this almost felt like a story of imprisonment.

Way the Hell Out takes an old trope - the idea of the outsider family terrorised by some horror in their new rural home - and shows us another perspective, all through a conversation between Fran and Morrie, in a cafe. They almost seem to be weaving the story as they go, prompting each other. Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Derelict is as much an undermining of the idea of a retirement idyll but told the other way round.  A husband and wife have retired to a small house above a sea cove. They have cut all their ties, left no loose ends, and are ready to spend their time not having to think. Except they haven't. Rubbish begins to wash up on the beach and Mary becomes obsessed with clearing it away. Meanwhile, we're told there is something particular they don't want to think about. A letter arrives from Vincent's ex employer and is put away, unopened. There is some problem with "our daughter" (not named). With not a word out of place, this is a perfect, intriguing gem of a story.

Salthouse opens "Winters are when people disappear". Following teenagers Gina and Evie one evening, it evokes both the in-between of an off-season resort and the in-between of young lives on the brink of changing, showing something also changing between the girls but a lot staying the same.

The Life of a Wave is anonymous, written about "you", "your father", "your mother", "your sister". Second person is tricky, personal, involving in a way neither first nor third comes near. In this story it is very effective at drawing the reader in to this story of a father and a son, set along the lifecycle of a wave from its beginning as a wind blown crease far out at sea to the final crash on the shore. That's fitting because the key thing about the father here is that he's a surfer - to the extent of forgetting his family, forgetting anything that may happen. As the story gathers pace this drives a wedge between the two and we wonder, can this end well?

Standing Water is the story of two neighbours who have long fallen out over a flooded ditch. Alive with long-fostered hatreds, it details the way the lives of the two fold intricately round each other.

A Year of Buryings is just that - vignettes of the lives lost over one year, the restless ghosts spawned form those deaths, the interrelatedness of the new occupants in the cemetery. Every story here is a perfect miniature - Wood can get as much feeling and narrative out of a single paragraph as some writers manage in a full length novel. As with Way the Hell Out there is a sense here of a participant shaping events and sometimes perplexed ("What the hell am I meant to do with that?")

Cables is another meeting with Fran and Morrie, now telling the story of a man obsessed by the undersea cables coming ashore on the beach. Convinced he can hear a hum from them, he is digging holes on the beach. As they fill up with water the two speculate on what's really going on (and it's clear they also know a fair bit about some of the other stories in the book).

The Sing of the Shore is a bout a brother and sister who run a fading campsite. Present and past blur together as they wander the fields and lanes both as children and adults (maybe 30 years later?) There's no sign or world now of the parents who appear in the "past" but nor of the boy who came to stay when Kensa was twelve, and then vanished. As with The Dishes there are perhaps hints to be decoded in the story but they almost seem to be there to tease the reader: all that is sure is the decaying site on a windy headland with the caves beneath and over it all that sound, the sing of the shore.

By-the-Wind Sailors is named for creatures that float where the wind blows them - here a family of three, homeless, shifting between caravans, flats over shops, garden huts and other semi-permanent accommodation. It goes on year after year, with the main feature of interest being the weather - you can learn to endure anything , except when you can't. A shifty, sad final story in this excellent volume, which has atmosphere in spades (make that children's, beach spades). It's a lovely book - not only in the writing but in the cover design too which is, sadly, uncredited.

As these stories grow, ramify, refer to one another and diverge again, Wood creates something more than simply a collection, she creates a world. An odd world with a lot of shade and may in between places, but also an intriguing, glinting world. Strongly recommended.

For more about this book, see the publisher's website.

Death and the Seaside

Image from www.saltpublishing.com

Death and the Seaside
Alison Moore
Salt, 1 August 2016
PB, 173pp
Source: bought from my local Waterstone's

When I was a child we would make family visits to Wallasey, the town the other side of the Mersey from Liverpool, where my mother's family came from. Sometimes we'd go to New Brighton, the seaside bit of Wallasey. It's probably been tidied up now but in the 70s it was a wonderful example of a tawdry, decaying seafront. The pier had gone, but there was a boating lake, a shabby amusement arcade ("The Bright Spot"), fish and chip shops, and a windswept promenade.

So at an impressionable age my image of the British seaside took a murky turn. That may explain why I picked up this book with its rain spattered cover and retro lettering when I saw it in the shop.

And immediately, we're at the seaside, a down at heel resort in the late summer. Susan arrives on her motorbike and takes a room over a pub, working in the bar and living apparently on crisps. She spends her time in the arcade losing money and drifting along the seafront smoking.

Then she begins receiving strange notes which might be telling her to "fail" - or might be blank.

Meanwhile, in a nameless inland town, perhaps in the Midlands, Bonnie, a disappointment to her parents, moves out of her their house and into a scuzzy flat - the sort of place where the carpet doesn't quite fit and previous tenants' belongings fill the cupboard. Bonnie has a couple of cleaning jobs, between which she tries to write. Her new landlady Sadie takes an interest in Bonnie's life and writing (indeed, something of an obsession) and pushes her towards completing her story.

Bonnie and Susan are alike in many ways - aimless, fixated on failure (but failure at what?) and there begin to be echoes between their stories. 'Susan' is Bonnie's middle name. Like Susan, Bonnie drifts between jobs, leaving when she can't be bothered any more: she's currently cleaning at an amusement arcade and at a lab that may or may not experiment on animals. Here she fall under the influence of Fiona, who begins to set her dares. Bonnie seems both innately suggestible and unlucky (a repeated motif is her being late for a meal, ending up with having nothing to eat) but also at some deeper level trying hard to control her life (she has shelves of self-help books, which she's read, though none completely).

As Susan tries to work out who the mysterious notes are from, and what they mean, Sadie suggests to Bonnie that they go away to - where else - the seaside. Sadie's convinced that the resort in Bonnie's book is a real place, and that going there will provide the inspiration needed to complete the story. It begins to look as though Bonnie's and Susan's stories will come together somehow.

This is a wonderful, tricksy, tart book, full of sly observations and self-commentary. Books about writers writing books make me wary, but this one really zings along. Bonnie, Susan and Sadie are wonderful characters - real, believable women. Bonnie is, we are more or less told, doomed to be a failure because she keeps being told she's going to fail. Her mother knows this, but it doesn't stop her snapping at Bonnie: her father is even worse (to be fair, he's not just nasty to her but to women in general: the TV goes off because even though it's the Wimbledon final it's only "the ladies"). There's something mysterious about Susan, and as for Sadie - well, I wouldn't actually want to meet her but she's a totally fascinating person.

As the story gets more complicated and begins to fold plot strand around plot strand, we also get the viewpoint of a psychological researcher, who was involved in some very strange experiments around suggestion and subliminal messaging - a central theme of the book - but, it seems, went too far in some way and was dismissed. There's a parallel with Bonnie's abandoned degree: we see fragments of Bonnie's abandoned dissertation, exploring the "meaning" of the seaside as a place where water and land, life and death, come together.

In many respects it's a map for this book. Sadie is probably right that the story will only come to its conclusion there - the only problem with that is, characters in stories have a way of doing the unexpected.

This is a lovely book from Salt, at once filled with penetrating observations and also, vaguely, diffusely, horrific. A story of manipulation, obsession and baffled intentions it'll haunt you the next time you hear gulls cry or the sound of rain on a seafront window.

For more information about this book see here.

Review - Diving Belles by Lucy Wood

Diving Belles
Lucy Wood
Bloomsbury, 2012
HB


I found this short story collection very impressive.

Lucy Wood conjures up a world where the most bizarre and the most everyday things rub shoulders easily. A care home caters for clients who aren't accepted anywhere else - chiefly retired witches and wizards. A company, the "Diving Belles' of the title story, helps women to retrieve their stolen-away menfolk from the sea using a diving bell (and net). You can even buy gift vouchers. A woman is distracted from urgent chores by her slightly annoying ex. The things she really needs to do (locking the windows, emptying the fridge, calling her boss to say she won't be at work for a bit) have to be completed soon, before she turns into a standing stone, a state of affairs which could last months or years. A boy visits his grandmother who has taken to living in a cave on the beach. The spirits on an empty house recall, with slight puzzlement, the ebb and flow of life over generations of its occupants. And so on. The stories are full of loneliness and regret. Couples meet and awkwardly fail to communicate. Things change and may be coming out right or they may not: the stories often take place on the cusp of changes or transformations, and often they don't quite give away what happened in the end. We just have to imagine it.

Wood has a real gift for making these extraordinary circumstances seem entirely natural - and thereby placing "normal" experiences and dilemmas (a teenager's uncertainty about "growing up", a sick parent, a grieving widow who feels guilty after her husband drowned) in a startling new light. This is summed up in the final story, where a storyteller wanders a small town, as if in farewell. Things seem to be coming to an end for him. As he recalls wrecks, smugglers and murder he seems only to be retelling the plotlines from the TV soaps he's recently taken to watching, yet at the same time he remembers events that he witnessed centuries before. Finally, though, he senses a story climbing towards him from deep in the abandoned mine workings. It could be a new beginning - or something very bad may be about to happen. That seems to me to capture the essence of the book, the weird blending of the fantastic, mythical and ancient with the everyday.

The book is also full of the sound of the sea, of sand, cliffs, things washed up on the beach - or lost to the waters. It's one of the most atmospheric books I've read in a long time, and deeply haunting.