I didn’t know Charlotte Salomon before reading Charlotte. I wasn’t enthused about reading this book (So why did you request it from Netgalley then? one asks. Because I request everything from Netgalley because free books. That doesn’t seem like a very good reason. Well, no. It isn’t.) But sometimes a book comes along at exactly the moment you need to read it.

Little by little, she does everything more slowly: eating, walking, reading. Something inside her is slowing down.

Her body, I imagine, being infiltrated by melancholy.

The kind of melancholy that devastates, that never goes away. Happiness becomes an island in the past, unreachable.

I know that feeling!

Grandmother and granddaughter understand each other. Their hearts beat in the same way.

That’s how I feel about my grandmother, who I miss like a limb more and more each day.

Paint so she will not go crazy.

Replace paint for write fiction and that’s also me.

So I needed this. I needed Charlotte by David Foenkinos.

In style, tone, topic, time period, basically every descriptor of the novel, Charlotte reads like HHhH by Laurent Binet: clipped sentences that function as paragraphs, Holocaust, Europe, World War II, the act of resistance, the narrator as a character in the novel itself, the narrator’s search in the here-and-now woven into the historical story of Charlotte Salomon. But don’t mistake this for Charlotte being derivative. It’s its own story. As Foenkinos says:

I felt the need to move to the next line in order to breathe.

So, I realized that I had to write it like this.

Maybe now, with distance, with writing about atrocities removed from one’s own existence by the passage of time, that’s all a writer can do: a line or two and then a breath. Else we become overwhelmed. Even so, missteps occur. I knocked a full star off (to four stars out of five) for Foenkinos’ disingenuous comparison of his being spoken to rudely by a woman who didn’t want him to come onto her private property to the anti-Semitism Charlotte Salomon endured in Nazi-occupied France. Those two things do not merit comparison. I did not like that part. Actually, you can’t really like anything in a book about the Holocaust, can you? Like is for ice cream and action movies. I’d say that part made me angry, but the whole book made me angry because one is angry when reading about the Holocaust. One has to be. Disgusted, same descriptive problem. So I guess I’m back to a misstep. Try to ignore that page and read on.

Thus, in summary and in repetition, I needed to read this.

Charlotte by David Foenkinos went on sale May 3, 2016.

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

Sometimes I just want to read books about Canada. Even if that Canada is shrunk down, essentially, to only Toronto, there’s something comforting about the Canadian-ness of Can-Lit. You can see the importance of literature that speaks outside the white, male, American/British experience when one finds a book that gives comfort to one’s own experience. So Middle-Aged Boys & Girls — even when the stories are supposed to be cringe-inducing, I can still feel like yay Canada (Toronto)! Yay women! Yay yay!

I can’t say that every story works. The collection’s opener Shadow Selve is too rambly, and feels almost out-of-place with the other, more focused stories. The female characters tend to melt together, a bit bitter, a bit trusting, a bit beat down by life. Yoga keeps reappearing. Passionless marriages. The description of husband and wife as brother and sister appears in consecutive stories. Plus there are unnecessary framing devices, like an in-your-head-conversation to an ex-boyfriend in Prey or what feels like the endless beginning to Doughnut Eaters musing on the neighbours before getting to the actual story which takes place years earlier in Germany.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy Middle-Aged Boys & Girls. I did. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I just couldn’t love it. The plots and the writing were at such high a level that when there was a misstep, it was all the more apparent because it felt so out of place. Plus I’m jealous. I’d love to have a collection of short stories published.

Contemporary Canadiana. If that’s what you enjoy, you’ll probably like Bracuk’s book. But you might not love it.

Middle-Aged Boys & Girls by Diane Bracuk went on sale March 1, 2016.

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

A bunch of Japanese comic strips about Atsumi, a high school girl who looks like a child, and her younger brother Atsushi, a child who looks like a high school student. They have parents, eventually, about half-way through when I was starting to wonder why Atsumi and Atsushi were living on their own. Their friends and neighbours make an appearance. Atsushi’s teacher, Moriyama-sensei, is around too. The jokes just recycle through — mainly that Atsushi, looking like an adult but really a young boy, keeps getting arrested for “kidnapping” his classmates. I guess it’s funny that the Japanese police force are on the lookout for child predators? Or that a lot of older girls/women want to date Atsushi because he looks like an attractive young man? I guess, maybe, sort of funny? Reading Recorder and Randsell is sort of like reading all the Peanuts‘ strips where Lucy is holding the football ball for Charlie Brown: you know what’s going to happen, but you keep reading anyway.

But, over-arching everything else in this manga, we need to discuss more on Moriyama-sensei (ignoring the fact that she seems sexually attracted to her student Atsushi, which is just rather unsettling.) Even adjusting for manga/anime style, Moriyama-sensei’s bosom is distracting. My back aches just looking at her boobs sticking out like a good foot from her body. Like having two watermelons Krazy-glue’d to your chest. I’m guessing that this artistic choice of character rendering probably should be taken as a hint that I am not the projected audience of this manga.

Recorder and Randsell by Meme Higashiya went on sale September 1, 2015.

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

Tesfa’s thoughts:

I liked it. I liked that there was more than one story so it felt like it kept going. My favourite story was the last one where Pinkie Pie goes to a fair and eats all these cupcake things and gets sick but then learns how to not eat so many. I also liked the story about teaching the pegasuseseseseses [sic] to fly. One of the stories though I already had the comic book so I didn’t read that one.

I liked it. I want to read more comics like this on the iPad.

Tesfa (Age 7).

My Little Pony: Friends Forever Volume 3 went on sale March 17, 2015.

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

The other day I went to Netgalley because I go there and click on books I want to read thinking that I will never be approved for them, and then I get approved, which is why I have an enormous backlog of books to review from Netgalley. Pretty much, Netgalley is my book addiction enabler.

And there, right on the front page, is a picture of Denise Mina, and, due to my aforementioned book addiction, I know what Denise Mina looks like so I’m like Oh my goodness, Netgalley must have a new Denise Mina book for me to read and I click on Ms Mina’s face and the little flag on the request-book-sub-website that tells you what countries they are approving readers for is a Union Jack and I’m like Whatever. That used to be Canada’s flag and I lived in the UK for two years thirty years ago and I don’t care, just give me the new Denise Mina book!. And then they do and I’m so happy and then I actually read what Netgalley is offering and it isn’t the new Denise Mina book: It’s only a chapter from the new Denise Mina book.

Whaw-whaw sad trombone sound.

Still, partial Denise Mina is better than no Denise Mina. Although I’ll likely read all of The Long Drop when it comes out, irrespective of what I think of the first chapter, because the first chapter of mystery novels are always disjointed and disorienting because they want to pique your interest and make you want to read the next chapter, then the next, then the next, etc. There’s a bit too much detailing of physical traits for my taste in the first chapter (what he wore, what colour the walls were, etc.), but it’s a mystery novel. Excessive description may come in handy later for solving the mystery. Still, I wish that an editor would have stripped a lot of it away.

So the first chapter was all right. Could have been awful; I’d read the final book anyway, although waiting until 2017 to do so seems like a big tease.

In any case, maybe Denise Mina will be my friend and then send me all of The Long Drop before the release date for me to read.

Yay Denise Mina!

The Long Drop goes on sale sometime in 2017. It probably says on the Netgalley page a more specific date, but I was too blinded by Denise Mina possibilities to read the page properly.

I received the first chapter free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Ever start watching a movie, say on television or one of the older airplanes where they show everyone in the cabin the same thing rather than let you choose your own show on the seat back television, part way through: it’s sort of engrossing but also frustrating. If so, then you’re well set for Yuki Chan in Brontë Country by Mick Jackson, which starts right in the middle of a musing on revolving restaurants. Okay. Revolving restaurants. Wacky and retro. Then the Brontës. Some snow. Visiting seniors prior to appropriate visiting hours. Who pays for Yuki’s visit to the NHS? Some flashbacks about how Yuki has fainted, two entire times, in the past. Dogs. Pellet guns. Snow. Does it just seem like I’m listing off random things here? I guess it’s because I didn’t really see the point of this book. In one way, it’s like those nineteenth century Russian naturalist novels where everything is detailed, no matter how tiny, like a perfect, little portrait on a tiny piece of scroll work. But in another way, so what?

The fundamental issue here is that the idea of the book, that Yuki is a psychic detective investigating her mother’s earlier, psychic detective, journeys around London and the English countryside, is far more intriguing than the actual book itself. When nothing comes of the book, the disappointment of a good idea wasted is too much. All the snow, the atmosphere, it’s very The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen, except at least the little match girl dies at the end. Yuki, I guess she learns one fact about her mother she didn’t know before. Of course, it isn’t really anything she was looking to find out.

And why exactly is Denny so interested in following Yuki around in the first place?

Too many questions. Too little resolution. Sure, just like life, but frustrating nonetheless.

Yuki Chan in Brontë Country by Mick Jackson went on sale January 21, 2016.

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

A book which should probably be subtitled One Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese dude’s belief that Yu Dafu is still alive, explored in a fictitious setting. Because did Yu Dafu survive his likely assassination by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1945 and then go on to continue writing on banana notes or tortoise shell backs or forced to a small Malaysian island to convert to Islam and never write Chinese characters again? Because that’s what the stories in this book are about. Pretty much all of them. Variations on the theme of Yu Dafu’s non-death.

What causes such an obsession to write and write stories about one thing? I know I write and write stories about bad mothers again and again because of my own insecurities. Maybe Kim Chew Ng imagines that he’s an illegitimate son of Yu Dafu, in some fashion, and writes these stories out of these fantasies. Maybe Kim Chew Ng has a whole other roster of stories not about Yu Dafu and these ones were collected together because of their thematic similarities? I don’t know enough about contemporary Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese literature to know for sure.

To be fair, it isn’t that I don’t know enough about contemporary Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese literature; I know nothing about contemporary Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese literature. So the whole collection was sort of a surprise. I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be humourous. It isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but the characters get themselves into ridiculous situations, like a researcher pretending to be a monkey while trapped on an island with a visually impaired Yu Dafu-esque figure in order to get closer to Yu Dafu without Yu Dafu realising it. Or characters getting themselves abducted by an elderly female pirate and her crew. Or a character being sexually aroused by turtle shells. It’s odd and entertaining, but still a bit distancing because of cultural barriers. Like I didn’t know what the May 4th Generation was, so sometimes I felt a bit lost. But usually just pleasantly lost, like wandering around a pretty, different city, with lots of wondrous stuff to look at. So it was pleasant, my first foray into a collection by an overseas Chinese from Malaysia now living in Taiwan.

In the last story, the only one that I was disappointed in, because it just stopped and I was confused by its abruptness, a character makes a video game to run through all the possibilities for an overseas Chinese coolie living in Malaysia/Singapore sixty, seventy, eighty-odd years ago. This book feels like that but for Yu Dafu. And so, now I know a lot more about Yu Dafu, and the possibilities that may have existed if he didn’t really die way back in 1945.

Slow Boat to China and Other Stories by Kim Chew Ng went on sale March 8, 2016.

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

Ooooooh …. spooky!

Normally I shy away from multi-author fiction collections since the quality and tone tends to vary so markedly. I can’t really remember why I decided to give this horror collection a try. Probably because it said Best of, so I figured it wouldn’t be awful. And it wasn’t awful; it was pretty good. I read through it quickly in two evenings. I can’t say that there were any stand-outs for me, but overall, the tone wasn’t overly genre. This was more like reading literary fiction in the horror realm than pure slash-em-aliens-ghost-psychic pulp. And there were some slash-em stories, and alien stories, and ghost stories, and psychic stories, a good variety of different plots and points-of-view. Nothing too frightening though (although I doubt anything is going to be as frightening as me being eleven, alone in the dark, and reading about Danny getting trapped in the snow tunnel The Shining). Just mild thrills. A good diversion.

The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5 edited by R.J. Cavender went on sale May 6, 2015.

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

I guess I am still unstuck in time because as I read the first few pages of Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due I thought to myself just in time for black history month. Except it was March. So oops. I amended my thoughts to Just in time for International Woman’s Day after I realised about half-way through Nalo Hopkinson‘s introduction that Ghost Summer: Stories, that Tananarive Due is female. I don’t know. I can’t really say I’ve been on the ball lately.

I feel like just going meh about this review and leaving it at that. I could have probably guessed I’d go meh after Hopkinson’s Introduction, because that’s how I feel about Hopkinson’s work as well. I don’t hate it. Just nothing grabs me. Going back to my complete obliviousness, I’d thought Ghost Summer: Stories would be more of horror stories, probably because of the ghost in the title. They’re kind of spooky, but nothing really terrifying, so that likely added to my assessment of meh. The stories don’t necessarily speak to my experience, which is fine; I don’t expect all books and all stories to be geared towards me. Perhaps if I were a WOC, specifically a black woman from the Southern US, I would feel some of the horror more acutely, like how certain stressors (like reactions to racist violence) can be passed down bloodlines.

But the real meh for me comes in the fact that most of these stories are less self-contained stories than starting points. Due can set up such a intriguing idea and then the story just ends. Reading Ghost Summer: Stories is like talking to that friend of yours who has so many cool ideas and then just doesn’t do anything with them. There’s a story about a disagreeable baby who gets possessed by a calming spirit and that’s it. The baby gets possessed. Nothing more. There’s a story about a boy who knows the day he’s going to die. It’s in four years. That’s it. Nothing more. There’s a story about a boy in quarantine who is a Patient Zero for an epidemic. Then his doors are left unlocked, so he walks out of the ward. That’s it. Nothing more. See what I mean? All these are just the starting point. They aren’t stories. They are half-stories, a whole (in my copy) two hundred and seventy three pages of starts with not one of those pages devoted to a proper ending. Not even ambiguous thought-provoking or discussion-provoking endings. Just stops. It’s crazy-making!

The most interesting part of this collection is the, for lack of a better word, bios Due writes at the end of the each story, about why or where or how she wrote the stories. At least those are more complete than the stories themselves.

Ghost Summer: Stories is a great poster-child for the We Need Diverse Books movement. I’m glad I read it. But I can’t say I’m really happy with the stories themselves. Maybe short fiction just isn’t where Due should be since her ideas need more room to grow.

Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due went on sale September 15, 2015.

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

It seems kind of redundant for me to have written The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig by Stefan Zweig. Who else would they have been by? I think I need to write a story called The Collected Novellas of a name that isn’t mine by my name. Also, it won’t be collection of novellas. It’ll be a poetry book or a piece of investigative journalism or a video game. It will be full of sentences like The red house is blue and Feed the dog food to the cat.

Moving on to novellas of Stefan Zweig by Stefan Zweig, wikipedia tells me that “[a]t the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular writers in the world.” I could see why. With only a few broad strokes, the world he paints has such vivacity, the ostentatiousness of middle-Europe before and between the wars. The first class carriages and lamp lit streets and fur coats on ladies and thin little cigarettes. Silk stockings with lines up the backs. Men with mustaches, unironically.

And then, because don’t I always have my and then‘s, there’s a sort of monotony in excess. The stories are dense for very little actual goings-on and they start to drag. Plus all the women in the stories are silly, bobble-headed fools. They actually aren’t differentiated in any way, so I’ll rephrase: the woman in four of these novellas is a silly, bobble-headed fool. Her adultery, since the woman never remains faithful, is clearly on her, never on the man with whom she partakes her dalliances, or even the husband who (in story number three), and this is a big spoiler here, hires an actress to torment his wife to the point of suicide. Yes, the husband concocts a plan that destroys his wife’s mental state, but she’s the one who needs her head examined; he’s presented as quite the clever fellow for his machinations.

My book’s blurb laments how Zweig has fallen out of fashion. Yes, well, there may be a reason for that when an author treats fifty percent of the populace as flibberty-gibbets.

Moving on again from those four novellas of Zweig’s, The Collected Novellas has one more story in it: A Chess Story. Our maligned adulteress is not present; actually I don’t think any women are, which raises a whole other set of issues, but pushing that aside, why couldn’t the four other novellas be like this one? We’re on a ship, men are strolling about having metaphorical cock-fights with each other, and then it jolts into a whole, completely paranoid, Old Boy-esque backstory of a man trapped in a hotel room, losing his mind, and megalomaniac chess masters, and the whole thing races even though it’s a chess match where one of the players is purposefully going slow and it’s like all the things one dreams of in a novella, speed and plot and emotion and gravitas, but then we’re done and A Chess Story is only the second story in this collection, and there are three more to go, and if it weren’t for the brilliance of A Chess Story I’d just toss the book at the wall (not really, it’s on my kobo) and forget about it.

So I liked The Chess Story. The rest can stay behind in obscurity. For my tastes of Germany between the wars, I’ll take Christopher Isherwood, any day, instead.

The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig by Stefan Zweig went on sale February 2, 2016.

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

(On Netgalley, when one posts a review, there’s always a Are you interested in connecting with this author checkbox. I only check yes for authors who are deceased because I really want to see Netgalley try to make that sort of thing happen. So maybe we’ll get a Stefan Zweig seance sometime in the future courtesy of Netgalley.)