#Review - The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston

The Dead Romantics
Ashley Poston
Harper Collins, 29 September 2022
Available as: PB, 345pp, e, audio
Source: Purchased/ audio subscription
ISBN(PB): 9780008566562

I came to The Dead Romantics having loved Poston's Once Upon a Con series of geek-themed fairytales, and it didn't disappoint - either in its similarities or in its differences.

The main similarity is perhaps that at the story is both fulfilling and referencing the romance genre, though creating a background to that which allows things to be seen from quite a different perspective. In Once Upon a Con that was the geek culture of fandoms, in The Dead Romantics it's... something else.  (The general no-nonsense affect of Florence Day does also I think make her a spiritual sister to Elle Wittimer or to Imogen Lovelace).

The main difference from the earlier books is the way that's done - here, Day is herself a romance writer, albeit a ghostwriter for renowned romance star Ann Nichols. So we get something of an "inside publishing" critique too, replete with scary editors, writers' block and even plagiarism.

Day left her little home town to make it in big in New York, where she's now flailing rather, her writing stymied by her conviction that romance is dead leaving her unable to kindle the flame that she needs to finish her latest novel - which she ought to do by tomorrow. In fact, as we learn when she's called back to said hometown, there is more to her departure from the place than appears at first sight. Poston delights in giving us Day's backstory, and explaining why she's estranged from her family of undertakers. The whole thing is an audacious mix of the incredible and of raw human emotion, and Poston carries it with complete success - by the midpoint of this novel, I was booing Florence's high school nemesis and screaming for her to recognise what's going on when her love interest turns up from the city.

Part of the reason she can't, that she's distracted, goes back to the events of ten years ago, and part is due to a more recent tragedy, and I don't want to spoil either, so all I will say is that Florence Day has one of the most complicated romantic lives you can imagine, as well as some peculiar talents that ought to make things easier but don't. And those distractions, those problems, she has to confront - well, they're literally matters of life and death, the barriers to happiness that you'd expect in romance being rather more unyielding here than in general.

Reader, I will not give away the ending. If you've got your genre right you may get a general sense of how things turn out - our maybe not. But I can say that it's a magnificent, satisfying and intricate story with bold and fun characters and a very down to earth sense of what is, at the end, important. 

A hilarious and rather moving read, showing that, in the midst of death, we are in life.

Recommended.

For more information about The Dead Romantics, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - No Honour by Awais Khan

No Honour
Awais Khan
Orenda Books, 19 August 2021
Available as: PB, 289pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy provided by the publisher
ISBN(PB): 9781913193782

Honour, Falstaff remarks in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, is 'a mere scutcheon', a symbolic device. It is, though, a device that can affect behaviour. It can drive people on, cause them to kill or make them be willing to be killed. And so we see here, in No Honour, Awais Khan's moving account of a life in contemporary Pakistan, which examines "honour" from all sides.

Abida is a young woman living in a remote village. Her mother is concerned that, at 16, she's still married, so her father Jamil, a poor butcher, makes overtures to the Pir, an influential and wealthy local figure with sons who need wives.  Money (which the family can't afford) is spent on a meal to entertain the Pir, who repays them by being rude, and his ghastly son is introduced. However, Abida has her own ideas and has secretly been meeting Kalim out in the fields. Naturally one thing leads to another and soon Abida is in a mess. 

It's a story as old as time, but one where the stakes are especially high because of the culture and customs of the village. Another girl has recently been murdered in similar circumstances. This book isn't for the fainthearted, we see the villagers, driven by bloodlust, calling for the murder, with the Pir at the centre of things. It's a misogynistic culture, where, for example, the birth of girls is seen as a sign of weakness and male power in enforced ruthlessly (later, Abida encounters a mother whose daughters have, one by one, been murdered at birth).

So Abida's future looks bleak, and this book likely to be grim. But although dealing with brutal events, it contains a thread of hope. Forced to flee the village, Abida seeks to make a life for herself in the city of Lahore, a very different setting from the one she's used to. She has limited education (why would a girl need that?) and is disadvantaged by the society around her. Also, some of those she depends on are weak or selfish. Things become very difficult, and Abida ends up in a very desperate situation - she is treated vilely and her efforts to escape are punished brutally.

Abida remains, however, strong, resourceful and loving, determined to be free and to be with her family. And she has support from Jamil. Appearing at first scared of the Pir's power, he eventually leaves the village and sets out to find his daughter Lahore is as strange to him as it is to Abida, he has no friends or allies there but he, too, is strong and determined. This part of the book reminded me of Dickens at his most stark: a depiction of the teeming humanity in a throbbing, multi-faced city, a city full of perils and snares but also, friendships, acts of solidarity and, yes, love. The relationship between Jamil and Abida is at the centre - he is not a perfect man by any means, but he has a curiosity, and perhaps a streak of bloody-mindedness, as well as a family history, that prevents him from settling for "the way things have always been done" despite the obstacles around him - mainly those created by powerful, corrupt men. The propensity of such men to distort and debase society is laid bare here, making this as much an expose of patriarchal culture as it is a story of hope, love and redemption.

As I have said, there are many different conceptions of honour here; the desire to keep up appearances, to bolster a hierarchical and sexist order; an excuse used by bullies  to act out violent fantasies; or being true to one's family - wife, child, parent; following love; risking much for a loved one; heroic self-sacrifice to protect others; and many more. Is honour something bestowed by others, or does it arise from within? What acts preserve it, and what destroy it? Once lost, can it be regained? The truest expressions of it, as Khan shows, may be modest and hidden acts - charity for a man beaten by thieves; mercy and protection for a desperate young woman; not giving up when life becomes hard and there is no light in the darkness. 

In all, No Honour was a terrific read. We see humanity at its best and worst, enduring love, appalling cruelty and stubborn faithfulness. Many times, as I read this, my heart was in my mouth. Many times, I didn''t want to turn the page for fear of what I might read. Every time, I had to continue with this compelling and convincing story. I hope you will, too.

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for an advance copy of No Honour to consider for review and to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in this blogtour.

For more in formation No Honour, see the Orenda Books website here or the other stops on the tour, listed on the poster below. You can buy No Honour from your local bookshop, or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

Blog tour poster for "No Honour"

 

Review - Coming Up For Air by Sarah Leipciger

Coming Up For Air
Sarah Leipciger
Doubleday, 19 Mar 2020
Available as: HB, e, 320pp
Read as: e-copy via NetGalley
ISBN: 9780857526519

I'm grateful to the publisher and to NetGalley for a free advance e-copy of this book.

And now for something (for me) completely different.

Coming Up For Air tells three stories, taking place in late 19th century Paris, mid-20th century Norway and late20th/ early 21st century Canada.

We see a young woman - never named, she is literally referred to as L'Inconnue (the Unknown Woman) - travel to Paris and take up a post as companion to Madame Debord, a suspicious ('She may have been paranoid but she was still a Parisienne'), irascible older widow (older than L'Inconnue, that is, and by the judgement of the time, "old").

In Norway, Pieter Åkrehamn is a young child in the 1920s and later a grown man in the 40s and 50s. It becomes clear that he is narrating his life story - a story balanced between a love of the Northern seas and lakes, of swimming in the cold water until just before it begins to kill and between a constant, haunting grief.

And in Canada, Anouk grows up in the 80s, a girl with cystic fibrosis. Leipciger describes, not a tragedy bravely borne or any other cliche, but the day to day practical difficulties for her and for her parents. Again there is a fascination with the outdoors, with swimming now in the rivers and lakes, even the polluted Lake Toronto. (The chapters focussing on Anouk interleave with those on her mother, Nora, but these two sections are much closer to each other than the rest of the book).

Each story - and they are very different - is narrated with a crystal clear eye for detail ('the hard rainfall of a piano being played mezzo-forte', 'granite like the story of the Earth'), a studied appreciation of, and empathy for, the tiny events and incidents of everyday life. L'Inconnue's takes place over the shortest period but documents her growing up - coming to Paris as a "provincial", learning how to live there ('this was my first city, and it was Paris': there that sense here of Paris as more than a place, as a civilisation) becoming increasingly confident and self-assured, discovering love ('She had a beautiful potted belly, and if a hundred cakes would have given me a belly like that I would have eaten every one of them') but - not a spoiler as this is the first scene we encounter - throwing herself into the Seine in despair. Anouk's story parallels L'Inconnue's, we see her growing up, a happy child, through medical crises, finding her feet, weathering her parents' increasing distance, but, also, coming to a crisis point where her condition requires a lung transplant.

Bridging the two, Pieter's story spans the longest period and forms a critical bridge in the book though it also forms the shortest part of the book. Pieter's account is wrapped round a loss and is perhaps the most intense of the three, telling of a grief, almost while not addressing it. It was incredibly moving.

Three different stories yet they have some common themes. Both Pieter's and Anouk's stories touch on men - husbands, fathers - who seen self reliant and in control but who at critical moments are actually absent or absent-while-present: they don't know what to do, they freeze. It's Anouk's mother who deal with the dead deer, it's Pieter's wife who saves the house from fire (and who copes with the difficult child when he can't). These are significant moment but Leipciger doesn't make them simplistic turning points in the narrative or in relationships.

Similarly, the idea of water, of immersion, runs through all three narratives. For Anouk it's both a balm, helping her live with her condition and - if the warning signs are not heeded - a danger. The margin is slight, as we see also with Pieter when he swims out too far. And L'Inconnue too develops a fascination for the Seine before that final plunge.

And, of course, there is death. Actual deaths, as the loved are borne away, sometimes overtly marked - a joyous funeral in Canada - sometimes not, as when unclaimed corposes are exhibited in the Paris Morgue, visited by L'Inconnue and her lover - sometimes simply passed over, as with a boy who dies unseen. Deaths garnished with rumour and fancy. Deaths that afford life to others, as transplant donors or the inspiration for life saving innovations. Potential deaths, close escapes: the book explores that margin, that grey area, discussing the idea of resuscitation, the limited time when death can be averted, undone.

There's an idea behind this, I think, the symmetry of life and death - life as a brief interruption to death, rather than the other way round: 'Where we are, I think it's like a river and you're the flow. And every so often, out of the flow, you, me - all of us - we crawl up on to the bank and we do life... River is life and death both'.

At a time of uncertainty and indeed death, it's actually a rather uplifting thought to take from this very beautiful, absorbing book. I would strongly recommend.

For more information about Coming up for Air, including links to places where it can be bought, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Silver Wind by Nina Allan

Cover by Julia Lloyd

The Silver Wind
Nina Allan
Titan Books, 10 September 2019
PB, 366pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of The Silver Wind to consider for review.

The Silver Wind feels to me like a key to Allan's writing.

Over the past couple of years I have loved her novels The Race, The Rift and most recently, The Dollmaker. In these (mostly) earlier stories loosely following the career of Martin Newland and of a group of characters round him whose histories, identities and lives shift, merge and overlap, I can see foreshadowings of themes and features of those other books.

The devastated south coast of England that is the backdrop to parts of The Race.

The theme of loss and abandonment central to The Rift.

Andrew Garvie, the marginalised (dwarf) protagonist of The Dollmaker, that book's quest for an elusive creator, Ewa Chaplin, and the intertwining landscape of her stories that forms the background to the story (including the alternate, militaristic England in which a famous actress departs or dies, and perhaps the germ of the "court dwarf" theme itself.

More fundamentally there's Allan's forensic, yet tender, sense of place - demonstrated in Garvie's journey through Reading to the West of England and in The Silver Wind through an almost passionate exploration of the Streets of Southwark, of the woods of Shooter's Hill, of South Coast towns. In her writing you almost know these places, you feel your feet wandering down alleys and lanes and you feel the strangeness when a step takes you out of your way.

I'm in danger of. dissolving into mere vapid praise. It's hard to write this review because my usual go-to move - lightly summarise the plot and draw out memorable incidents - just won't work. This is less a single story than a collection, but a collection in which every new story reworks, reinterprets, deconstructs or comments on the others.

The same characters recur but with drastically different histories. In the first, "The Hurricane" apprentice watchmaker Owen Andrews travels to London from Devon to take up a new post, leaving Newland and his sister Dora behind and remembered but peripheral. In another, set in that militaristic alt-world, Andrews is a master craftsman, holed up in a remote wood (hints of fairytale) who Newland, an estate agent, seeks out. In other stories the relationship between Newland and Dora is explored and Andrews is a marginal figure.

Yet behind these differences at the same time these are the same people, the stories are the same stories. Explanations in one story sometimes cast light on the others, sometimes not. We never learn what became of Andrews after he flees at the end of "The Hurricane", set seemingly in an alternate 1920s (but apparently warping to the present day at the end). Never, that is, unless the call back at the beginning of "Rewind" (which is surely looking back to the, or a, 19th century?) is the answer.  Motifs recur - the Circus Man on the beach in a South Coast seaside town, the lesbian "Aunts", an Uncle Henry who plays different roles. Most of all, perhaps, a sense of loss, of mourning a dead sister, a dead wife, a dead lover.

Complex, multilayered, multithreaded, this is less a collection of stories than its own mythology - in that respect it reminded me of M John Harrison's Viriconium stories - both unified and driven by the theme of time, time lost, regained, altered, of clocks and watches, of the mysterious tourbillon mechanism and i's creator, Breuget. Often introduced into the story as gifts (often from Uncle Henry) and referred to as "time machines" (a nice pun) the watches and clocks which Andrews constructs have abilities that go beyond merely marking time. They are active, though we never know the exact rules: it's as though the stories here are the same story, running through permutations and alternatives yet influencing each other as though different worlds overlap, a whole litter of Schrödinger's cats running round the house with different balls of wool, always separate , always entangled.

This book makes for rich, significant storytelling, storytelling where every word matters, every story is complete but the collection as a whole is also complete, adding whole levels of meaning. It's a book you can come back and reread, with new insights, where every different part adds much to the rest.

Very enjoyable, very thought-provoking and like a glimpse into an entirely new world. Finally, look at that glorious cover by Julia Lloyd - truly a thing of beauty!

Strongly recommended.

For more about this book, see the publisher's website here. You can buy it from your local bookshop, including via Hive Books, or from Blackwell's, Waterstones, Foyle's, WH Smith or Amazon.

Review - This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal al-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This is How You Lose the Time War
Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Jo Fletcher Books, 18 July 2019
PB, e 208pp

I'm grateful to Jo Fletcher Books for an advance e-copy of This is How You Lose the Time War via NetGalley.

'All good stories travel from the outside in'.

How to describe this book? It's brilliant. It's evocative. It's heartbreaking. It's tender.

Above all, it's beautiful.

In a multiverse not far from here, we find two agents - referred to simply as Red and as Blue. They act for different factions in a Time War: Red works for The Commandant, Blue is an agent of Garden. Both women are human, and more than human. They have formidable combat abilities, endurance, strength and they are able to move backwards, forwards and sideways through space and time, up and down the different braids, the timelines, that denote victory or defeat in the endless war. They are perhaps not born but created, their role to interfere, tip events one way or another - killing a leader, ensuring a technology develops or a trade route opens, something that will cascade down the braids, changing outcomes and winning their side an advantage in some remote age.

What the war is about, who the factions are and why they exist, isn't clear and doesn't need to be. We don't care who wins. What matters is that Red and Blue are eternal opponents, sworn and committed enemies, true believers in their causes - in the service of which they necessarily cross and recross each other, jostling for advantage. And as skilled and intelligent agents, they begin exchanging messages. They are taunting, scoring points. And, perhaps, one is trying to turn the other.

But hard earned, if grudging, respect leads to mutual understanding - perhaps, across all the timeline s in the multiverse, only Red and Blue can truly understand Blue, and only Blue can truly understand Red. Understanding leads to a sort of friendship (with no loss of commitment: "We will still win!") Friendship deepens and leads to... something like love. No, actually, to love.

Channeling the spirit of every story of star-crossed lovers (yes, there are references to Romeo and Juliet) el-Mohtar and Gladstone have spun here a simple, yet deep and ever so beautiful story of doomed love, often poetic ('Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein', 'It feels good to be reciprocal, eat this part of me while I drive reeds into the depth of you, spill out something sweet'), profoundly moving and fundamentally human and true - alongside the weird, eon-spanning SF setting.

And there is more. The authors like nothing more than puncturing their own balloon with a pun or a reference ('no road-met random monster', 'strangling that evil old man in a bathtub in his skyscraper penthouse'). And they won me with the observation that 'Even an immortal can only ride the [London Underground] Circle Line so long' (though it can feel like it sometimes).

It's a short book, one to read in a sitting, growing into the love between the two women, despairing at the fate that has made them what they are, the more so for the conflict being so shrouded and seemingly pointless.

A profound and glorious story, wonderfully written, uplifting even while sad.

VERY strongly recommended.