#Review - The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston

The Seven Year Slip    
Ashley Poston
HQ (HarperCollins), 4 July 2023 
Available as: PB, 336pp, audio, e  
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780008566593

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of The Seven Year Slip to consider for review.

The Seven Year Slip was such an enjoyable book to read, containing elements of fantasy (with a time travel concept at its heart) and romance but also a dreamy Manhattan atmosphere and an exploration of the worlds of publishing and of high-end restaurants.

It's the same universe, in fact, as in Poston's The Dead Romantics (the covers are nicely designed to compliment one another) with one or two characters from the earlier appearing in passing. The focus is though very squarely on newcomer Clementine West, who's going through a difficult time after the death of her beloved aunt and her breakup with Nate.

Clementine is a book publicist at Strauss & Adder, and her response to heartbreak - and other adverse life events - has been to throw herself into work, emulating superpublisher Rhonda. This always worked before, any threat to Clementine's work-life balance being addressed by spontaneous globe-trotting summer holidays with Aunt Analea. With Analea dead (and we will discover the particular sad circumstances of that in due course) Clementine cancels this year's booked trip to Iceland, but as somebody recently said, proximity to death does bring a certain clarity and Clementine is still left pondering where she wants to be in her life.

Fortunately - perhaps - she's provided with a distraction when a handsome young man appears in her apartment (which was her aunt's apartment), looking for somewhere to stay while he follows his heart's desire to become a chef. What could seem rather creepy actually turns out quite fascinating as Iwan comes and goes and shares his lifestory, his ambitions, and his fears. Over the following months his life and Clementine's entwine and they share some happy times and intimate moments - but it's the wrong time for either to commit to the other.

There's a fair bit I'm, annoyingly, not telling you here because the way that Poston lays out her story is rather special not only in terms of the facts of what's going on but also in terms of Clementine's development as a person overall and her growth in self-knowledge in particular. And in fact in terms of of Iwan's too. Poston is absolutely masterful in tracking the developing relationship, a sort of running commentary being provided by Clementine's workmates with whom she is engaged in a contest to snag a new celebrity author and save the company. That quest in itself produces some hilarious moments - this book is often very funny and it can move from moments of great emotion to plain funny in a trice.

How things are tied up is completely brilliant both in terms of the sequence of events and also of emotional development. It would have been easy for the latter to be overshadowed by the clever central concept here, but Poston is just too good a writer to let this happen and instead she gives Clementine's situation added resonance - there is a magic in life which she expected but which is lacking and the loss of her Aunt seems like the universe's ultimate betrayal, so why not shut down and lose herself in work?

The answer to that question is what the story turns on. It is a funny, heartfelt, sharply observed and really just very clever book - it is sure to be a hit I think and it was just a joy to read.

For more information about The Seven Year Slip, see the publisher's website here. 

#Review - Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang

Yellowface
Rebecca F Huang
Borough Press, 25 May 2023 
Available as: HB, 319pp, audio, e  
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780008532772

I'm grateful to the publisher for letting me have an advance e-copy of Yellowface via Netgalley to consider for review.

Yellowface is an enthralling thriller that explores online culture, the publishing world and the modern landscape of cultural debates about racism, privilege and appropriation. 

June Hayward is a mediocre US white writer who has struggled to get any marketing heft behind her recent debut novel. Her friend Athena Liu, who is of East Asian heritage, is in contrast seen as something of a literary darling. We will discover that the two women have history - through the book there's a progressive unveiling of their lives, their histories, their rivalry and most of all, the hidden places of their "friendship". For Athena, it is thought too late as the event that sets everything moving is her sudden and tragic death. This is witnessed by June - who takes the opportunity to steal the first draft of Athena's next book, a harrowing story of Chinese labourers working on the Western Front in the First World War. 

June feels she's owed something (exactly why, is one of those discoveries) but she also thinks she can improve the draft and she gradually persuades herself as she does so that it's a joint project, that she's honouring Athena by bringing her last novel to the world as it really should be. First, though, a few things need to change. There's an, actually quite funny, sequence where we begin to see the seeds of June's later downfall as she makes those "improvements" - for example, replacing Chinese names heedless of the cultural context or introducing incongruous elements to the story (and that's even before the publishers get their hands on it).

"June's book" is at first a great success, selling by the cartload and earning her unimagined wealth, but it can only be a matter of time before questions are asked, especially since she's been ambiguously repackaged as "Juniper Song". When it becomes clear that she's white, critiques begin to appear - followed by rumours about who really wrote the novel. The resulting online controversy is of course painfully redolent of several recent literary scandals - you can supply the names and details if you've spent any time hanging around book Twitter - and the moves and countermoves, the attempts at justification and positioning, the consequences, will be very familiar too. 

As things got worse and worse, I did have some sympathy for June. What she's done is of course indefensible, but it is also clear that she is very vulnerable - rather alone in the world, and suffering from poor mental health that leaves her ill equipped to cope with her situation: rather she retreats to bed and scrolls in horror through the online rage, unable to turn away. Through all of this, she does though come across as very naive. It's not only that she should have realised that what she was doing was wrong, and how things were likely to go, but she has a complete inability to read the room, as it were. For example, pressed by her publisher for a further work to publish, to demonstrate that she can write for herself and so underpin her credibility as the author of The Last Front, she's out of ideas. Despite the obvious pitfalls, she treks off to Washington's Chinatown and plops herself down in a Chinese restaurant to interrogate the staff about their ideas (after all she's already accumulated so much background on China and Chinese people, she might as well put it to good use, right?)

It's as though June is incapable of learning from what has happened - and indeed she compounds the situation, leading to situations which were actually quite painful to read: relationships destroyed, reputations ruined. But through all this, it's not, in the end, those aspects which get through to June. No, what begins to nag at her is the sense that Athena isn't gone, that she might be trying to get in touch... and of course she's not happy. This is where June really begins to go off the rails, and where the thriller element of the book comes to the fore...

Yellowface is an engaging, entertaining book that dramatises the kind of notorious public debate that seems to be occurring more and more often. In portraying things from the inside, there's room for a degree of nuance - for example Kuang is able to show how despite her celebrity, things were far from rosy for Athena, her heritage pigeonholing her in the eyes of her publishers and dictating her material even when she might want to write about something else. (They're more able to accommodate June, as a white woman, writing about Chinese themes than they do Athena wanting to broaden her range). 

If you were thinking that, as there's almost a script for this sort of controversy the book might seem too predictable, then be reassured, Kuang keeps the surprises coming, both rooting what happens in June's, and Athena's, earlier relationship and also in June's current, rather scatty, network of family and friends. The fact that June is rather a heedless person, acting without thinking, produces some positively toe-curling situations (as when she takes it upon herself to mentor an upcoming American-Asian writer), the more so because at times she seems utterly unaware of herself and of how she might be seen by others. (At others, though, she certainly does know what she's about - I think there might be a touch of unreliable narrator in places with the text we read reflecting her self-justications and rationalisations).

A thought provoking and, to me, often eye-opening book with I'd strongly recommend. (Though I have spotted that this one seems to polarise opinion - for an excellent, but more negative, view, see Reader at Work blog here).

For more information about Yellowface, see the publisher's website here. 

#Review - Secret Santa by Andrew Shaffer

Cover art by Adam Rabulais,
design by Ryan Hayes

Secret Santa
Andrew Shaffer
Quirk Books, 10 November 2020
Available as: PB, 210pp, e
Source: Advance copy provided by the publisher
ISBN: 9781683692058

I'm grateful to the publisher and in particular to Jamie and to Stephen for an advance copy of Secret Santa to consider for review.

In a fun, and seasonal, horror novel Shaffer peeks beneath the tinsel at a prestigious New Your publishing house to reveal the darkness within.

Lussi (pronounced, "Lucy") need to make a success of her new job at Blackwood-Patterson. Out of work for several months after her previous employer was swallowed up in a merger, when she gets a chance to pitch to the new boss at B-P for a job, she's not reticent ('all I do is shit best sellers'). But she's a genre editor - can she bring that success to a fusty literary publisher? And will her new colleagues let her try?

Given three weeks to try, it's time to raid the slush pile...

I love office based novels, and I love horror, so this was a perfect blend for me. I enjoyed seeing Lussi's attempts at fitting in and doing her job being frustrated by the stand-offishness at her new workplace, and then by a series of gruesome accidents. We've all that that moment (haven't we?) when we realise we weren't invited to a key meeting and wonder of it was on purpose. Or when we unintentionally press colleague's wrong button. Or HAVE OUR FOOD STOLEN FROM THE OFFICE FRIDGE. Shaffer deftly weaves such moments into a classic horror story, taking place, of course, close to Christmas. (Yes, I know it's Hallowe'en that is meant to be the season for horror but there's a reason for all those classic Christmas ghost stories...)

It's a book of contrasts - between friends and foes (but which is which?), the ordinary (mundane office life one moment, then a step into the spooky basement) and of course, in Lussi's increasingly desperate imagination, success and failure. Along the way, Shaffer has some fun with the publishing industry - I have a feeling some of the people described here may be closely based on real life. 

The story is very readable, and awash with a pleasing amount of mystery (who is being targeted, by what, and why - but even once you think you know the answers to these there are still secrets kept right to the end). Lussi is a smart and knowing protagonist - as a horror editor, she is well aware of this stuff, just not to meeting it in real life - but has to contend with a lot. It's not just the supernatural, there's the behaviour of her colleagues too, and indeed untangling the two is one of her most urgent problems, because even if she survives the monster, she's still got to rescue the company as well. Her new boss wants a bestseller and her wants it soon.

Overall a fun book which makes a nice counterpoint to the jollity of Christmas and strikes a good balance between out and out horror and office based humour. Secret Santa would make a good stocking filler for a horror fan, an office worker or anyone in publishing. (And because it's  all set in the 1980s, there is no home working, Zoom or social distancing).

For more information about Secret Santa see the Quirk website here.