I hate writing reviews for books that I didn’t like (especially since it seems whenever I write anything less than complimentary, the authors contact me and try to convince me that I’m wrong), so I’ll say, for Stay With Me, that the book works better in theory than in practice. In theory: when a wife fails to fall pregnant, her inlaws convince her husband to take a second wife. In practice: facile characters who behave with no more depth than a child’s puppets made from construction paper and popsicle sticks. As an example: the second wife. It wouldn’t have been out of place for her to cackle maniacally. There’s no examination of what she is getting out of the arrangement. She exists solely as a foil for the main character to rage against.

I was excited to read this book. Sadly, it’s one of those books where melodrama replaces character depth. Books like this make me feel manipulated: of course I’m going to feel badly for people in sorry situations (infertility under a dictatorship), but when there’s no further complexity to the characters other than their sorry situations, when the characters are defined solely by their sorry situation, I’m going to get frustrated. And I got frustrated.

Boo.

(Hopefully too Ms Adebayo isn’t going to write me something to tell me I’m a jerk for not liking her novel. Fingers crossed.)

Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo went on sale August 22, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Well, that was a bit of an anti-climax, although I’m not quite sure what I was expecting — a sudden, complete translation, that I’d look at it and my background in mathematics and cryptography would just reveal everything to me, even though clever mathematicians and cryptographers than myself have tried? I guess, yes, a little. In any case, my copy from Netgalley was fairly pixelated and impossible to make out the individual “letters”, so even if I’d been visited by an expected bit of genius, it wouldn’t have mattered much. So yeah, I did not crack the code.

There’s an intro and historical overview, not going as in depth into the math and statistical analysis as I would have liked. It was interesting, but didn’t tell me much more than I already knew. The pictograms on the bottoms of the pages in the actual manuscript, telling you where in each folio each page went, or how it was laid out on the fold-out pages, was helpful. But, in the end, like in my last book review, I wanted this to be a coffee-table book, not a blurry collection of squiggles on my ipad.

The Voynich Manuscript by ? went on sale August 15, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

(I have put that I want to connect with the author on Netgalley, who has yet to set up any seances for me with regards to dead authors.)

Firstly, the book is published today and I’m writing the review on the day of publication, so I think there should be a netgalley badge for that — not writing the review way after the publication date or way before and then scheduling it to post. Maybe I’ll make one in Paint later today (gotta keep up the pressure) and post it.

So I read this little listicle of book celebrating (a) Canadian women and (b) 150 of them because of Canada 150. A little proviso in the opening credits about the problematic taking of one hundred and fifty as the “age” of Canada, then right on into the facts.

Which I read.

All of them.

And other than the ones I already knew, mainly due to Heritage Minutes, I can’t recall any of them. Wait, there was a Sarah Polley quote about working hard.

Maybe it’s not a format that lends itself well to ebooks. Maybe a paper copy would have stuck in my mind more. Maybe it needs to be more like 50 Women In Science, with longer bios so that I have more for my memory to cling to.

In any case, yay Canadian women! I wish I could cram more of you into my brain.

150 Fascinating Facts About Canadian Women by Margie Wolfe went on sale August 15, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.