A writer of great descriptive power says the blurb on the front. Okay. Description. Except I don’t really enjoy reading description. Description reads heavy and unnecessary. From the name of one of the stories — Sylvia Wears Pink in the Underworld — I knew immediately it would be about Sylvia Plath, so much description is extraneous. A story with Diana in the title would be about Princess Diana. I think the titles do more than the stories, since they are short and snappy. The stories are pretty, but as I said, heavy. There’s no overall theme, except when there is (which we’ll say is beloved ghosts, like Diana and Sylvia and a great aunt who drowned in Cape Breton and Chekov and Angelica Garnett), and then the stories that don’t fit in with this theme (like In Praise of Radical Fish) are, like all the description, extraneous.

I liked the bits I liked. But then most of it is going to fade away like an empty spirit.

All The Beloved Ghosts by Alison MacLeod went on sale May 30, 2017.

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

There’s a story in The Accusation about faking emotion: crying when we’re happy, laughing when we’re sad. Under such a system as North Korea, all emotions are either muted or exaggerated. In the same vein, and for the same reasons, the writing style of The Accusation
also veers between muted or exaggerated melodrama, but what else can one expect from a society that represses or fakes emotion? I didn’t come into these stories expecting literature as much as a window into North Korean life. The Accusation is important not because of its literary merits, but because it exists as an act of rebellion against the horror of the North Korean regime. It’s crazy that North Korea exists, and The Accusation exists to show us that.

The Accusation by Bandi went on sale March 7, 2017.

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

Ah, rich people problems. To have a flat in London, sitting unoccupied. To jet off to Greece at the behest of a relative, and on a moment’s notice, because work, what’s that? To stay in a fancy Greek hotel, eating out at restaurants, and sure, it’s the off-season, but really? Come on.

And here we are, trapped inside the head of our nameless narrator, who, separated from her husband, still goes to Greece at her mother-in-law’s order, to find him. Her thoughts are banal because, like most people, her thoughts are banal and not in need of having every single on detailed. Her husband is rich and a playboy, and they separated because of his numerous infidelities, and I have used banal twice already but it is so banal and we have two hundred pages plus of this banality of our cipher narrator searching after her cipher husband with cipher locals poking about and there is absolutely nothing there. I can tell you nothing about the narrator or her personality or her likes and dislikes. Ditto everyone else in the book. Ditto why this woman would undertake this task. Ditto why this book got such accolades (amazon tells me Named a best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Huffington Post, The A.V. Club, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, Refinery29, Town & Country, Harper’s Bazaar, NYLON, BookRiot.). Obviously, there are far worse written books out there, but this is just a flat, monotone where I don’t care about anything, at all, ever.

A Separation by Katie Kitamura went on sale March 23, 2017.

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

So this is a huh of a book. Definitely not a huh? (with a question mark) what the heck did I just read? sort of book, but a book you finish and go huh or any other of your non-committal sounds of choice. His dad dies. He may or may not have lost his job as a radio host. He may or may not be in love with his radio producer. His sister may or may not be getting a divorce. His best friend may or may not be unhinged. His friend may or may not be a rapist. So, sure, let’s go take his father’s ashes to Kashmir, his father’s homeland. And go skiing. And yes, there is a fugue state. And a death, and I always think of music fugues as death-y, so there’s that. But in the end, it’s just one of those books where

1. lots of stuff happens, and yet
2. I can’t shake the feeling that absolutely nothing has happened at all.

No one seems wiser or smarter or even changed by the end. Except I guess the dad, who is dead. But maybe he’s the same in death, so who knows?

Fugue States by Pasha Malla went on sale May 30, 2017.

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